I drive to the station with the correct coffee cooling in the cupholder and the smoke on the southern ridge getting larger in the rearview mirror. Two thousand acres overnight. Additionalresources. The season doing what August fire season does when it’s been as dry as this one. I know what the next few weeks look like. I’ve done this enough times to know the shape of it. The calls, the rotation, the controlled burn of daily urgency that crowds out everything else.
I think about the bears on the pajama pants.
I think about her making the right coffee for me.
I think about the apartment ceiling, which I’ll stop noticing eventually, once I’ve spent enough time under it to know its specific cracks and stains.
I think she’s the same way I am. Showing up without explaining it. Sitting with things. Letting the thing be the thing.
The coffee is good, by the way. I should have said that. I didn’t say that. I saidyeahandokayand drove out of the parking lot, which is the type of thing I do.
Diaz is leaning against the bay door when I pull in, which is about as predictable as everything else about Diaz.
“Don’t,” I say, getting out of the truck.
“I’m not doing anything,” Diaz says.
“You’re doing the face.”
“I have one face. This is it.”
He has exactly one face. He’s had it since we were in the same company six years ago and it never changes and it always manages to say exactly what he’s not saying out loud, which is a talent that I’ve never decided if I admire or find deeply inconvenient. Today, it’s inconvenient.
I’ve tried to explain Diaz’s face to people who don’t know him. It’s not expressionless—that would be easier. It’s a face that’s settled into one permanent arrangement, and the arrangement doesn’t change based on what’s happening. What changes is the weight of it. Right now, the weight is: I see you, I’m not going to say anything, I’m going to be here anyway.
I walk past him into the station. He falls into step beside me.
“Elk Creek,” I say.
“Elk Creek,” he agrees.
We walk into the station. It smells like it always smells, like diesel fuel and coffee and the metallic clean of maintained gear. Three other people are already at the table with maps and tablets, looking like they’ve been reading incident reports since five a.m. Keller is on the phone in the corner, which means the call to division is already happening, which means this is moving fast.
I pour a cup of the station coffee, which is the aggressively average kind, and stand at the table looking at the incident map. The fire is there in red and orange doing what fires do when they’ve decided to be serious about it.
The season is escalating and there’s a briefing in a few minutes. I made terrible coffee this morning after waking up in her bed, drank the good version, and above the veterinary clinic there’s a woman with bears on her pajama pants who drank the wrong mug on purpose and didn’t say a word about it.
I’m going to think about that for the rest of my natural life.
Chapter 10
Sloane
I’m losing the perimeter.
Not all at once. I’d notice all at once. I have a plan for all at once. It’s happening the slow way, the erosion way, the way a riverbank loses ground to water so gradually you don’t clock it until you look down, and the bank isn’t where you thought it was. One conversation at a time. One rancher asking for me specifically. One morning in an apartment kitchen watching a firefighter make coffee wrong and feeling something entirely too domestic about it.
I’m a veterinarian. I understand slow-moving damage.
The fire season has made the clinic busy in a way I didn’t anticipate. Smoke-inhalation cases first, three barn cats and a horse from a ranch near the southern drainage that got caught in the Elk Creek smoke corridor before the wind shifted. Then livestock evacuations: a rancher named Morrison calling at six-thirty a.m. to ask if I can take four cattle overnight because the advisory area expanded. I can’t take four cattle, I explain, and then I call the Breslin ranch, which has space, and I coordinate the transport, and two hours later everyone’s where they need to be. I stop at the Breslin ranch on the way back to check on the Morrison animals and end up spending an hour on Duchess,who is colicky and opinionated and has decided that I am the only one she trusts to handle her.
There’s a difference between being useful and being needed, and I’ve been thinking about that distinction for two years without quite landing on it. In Idaho I was useful—competent, professional, dependable. In eastern Washington the same. Here something has shifted in the last few weeks: people aren’t calling the practice, they’re asking for me.
“I don’t let just anyone in,” the Breslin ranch hand says, watching as the cattle move through the gate.
“Animals are usually reasonable,” I say, which is something I believe and also a thing that applies to more of my life than I usually admit to.
By Thursday I have four clients who weren’t on my books two weeks ago, and all of them got here through the same channel: word of mouth from someone else I helped, a chain of referrals I didn’t start and can’t see the end of.
