Page 13 of Falling for My Grumpy Fireman

"Every time one of them left, she'd fall apart like the floor went with him. Took me till high school to figure out the trick." I shrug. "You leave first. It's tidier."

"Tidier," Debbie repeats.

"Nobody packs your boxes but you."

Carmen laughs because I said it funny. I always say it funny. Pris laughs too, and the conversation rolls on to Pris's mother-in-law and a casserole dish that may or may not have been returned dirty on purpose.

But Debbie doesn't laugh. She looks at me one second longer, then tops off my glass without asking.

Filing it away. I know a chart note when I watch one get written.

***

Monday, and Mr. Kessler is in room 214 charming the day shift out of their pudding cups.

"There's my favorite," he rasps when I come in. His lungs still sound like a screen door but his color's good and his eyebrows are growing back.

"You say that to every nurse."

"I mean it different amounts."

I check his oxygen, his lines, the whiteboard where somebody has written GOALS: WALK HALLWAY, ANNOY STAFF. One of those has a checkmark.

Then I open his bedside drawer for his glasses and find the crime scene.

Butterscotch discs. A whole yellow bag of them, half gone, shoved behind the tissue box like contraband. Which it is. The man is diabetic and everyone in this building knows it.

"Mr. Kessler."

"Now hold on."

"Amos."

"He brings 'em," Kessler says, throwing his accomplice under the bus without one second of loyalty. "The big fella. Comes by every day after his shift. Sits right there and lets me tell the fire story with me as the hero."

"Is that so."

Mistake. His eyebrows are already climbing. He shifts up on his pillows like a man taking the witness stand.

"He come through that smoke like it owed him money. Ceiling was talking by then. You know what a ceiling sounds like before it quits?" He waits like I'm going to answer. "He knew. Tore the tack-room door half off its hinges to get to me, put his own coat over my head, and walked me out of my own burning barn like we was leaving church." He settles back, satisfied. "You stitched the arm. He tell you how he got it?"

Barn had opinions. That's what he told me. Sitting on my table bleeding through a second dressing, more worried about this old man's oxygen than his own open arm, and the whole story he gave me was three words and a shrug.

He didn't. Of course he didn't.

I stand there holding the bag.

Every day. Nobody put that in a chart. Nobody announced it. The man who barked at my whole department like we were probationary firefighters has been sneaking in here every afternoon to sit with a lonely old farmer and smuggle him candy.

"He asks about my dog," Kessler adds. "By name."

"I'm confiscating these."

"You're as mean as he said."

"He said I was mean?"

Kessler grins, pleased as a cat, waiting to see what I'll do with that.