I grin. “Zach is fuckin’ smart, dude. Like, Andrea’s honor roll, but Zach’s like...”
“Don’t say it,” Leo grumbles. “I caught him trying to build a particle accelerator out of kitchen tools.”
He’s groaning, but there’s clear pride.
Yeah. I get it.
I get it far too well.
“August will catch up to him soon,” Doc says with a sniff, pushing his glasses up his nose, his sharp green eyes glinting. “She’s quite the wit. Takes after her father, naturally.”
I laugh. “Little Gus ain’t even talking yet, let alone walking or building things. Give it ten years, man. Then maybe she’ll join you and her mama at your vet clinic.”
He growls. “Do not call my daughter Gus.”
That just makes me grin wider. “Aw, why not? You call your wife Ember instead of September.”
“I—”
Leo cuts us off with a patient sigh. “C’mon, boys. Don’t start. I think we’re all too tired for the comedy bit tonight.”
“I feel that,” I say, offering Doc a smile as an olive branch.
He sniffs again, looking away from me in that cool way he has, but it ain’t hard to tell I’m forgiven.
If I wasn’t, he’d have flipped me off.
“Hey,” I add. “You need any help with her? The first kid’s always the toughest, and you and Ember are plenty busy chasing animals at The Menagerie. Ain’t she gonna be teething soon?”
In half a second, that icy demeanor vanishes and Doc winces, sagging and burying his fingers in his hair. “She already is. I feel like I haven’t slept in years.”
“Now, now, she can’t have been fussing more than a few days, young as she is.” I nudge him with my elbow. “Listen, I got a few tips to help her calm down. Andrea was a fussy teether, too.”
Doc gives me a haggard look.
“Please,” he says. “Teach me the wisdom of your ways. I had to let Ember deliver an entire litter of kittens on her own this week because I nearly fell asleep in the delivery room.”
“Well then,” I say. “Strap in, and let the advice man tell you what’s up.”
There’s something about helping people that takes me outside myself.
Think that’s why I like it so much.
Feels like I’ve been stuck in a rut for so long, I’d damn rather deal with somebody else’s. Most folks look at their lives as a line from beginning to end, stretching clean through space.
Me, though?
My life’s kind of like that line came to a screeching halt.
The night Andrea’s mother died, somebody just picked up the pen and made the line cut short, but that whole damn piece of paper’s still there, sprawled out in front of me.
It’s like I was supposed to die too when the ink line stopped, but since I didn’t...
Now, I’m just waiting in blank white limbo, wondering what I’m even here for.
I mean, nah. I know who I’m here for.
Andrea’s reason enough to wake up in the morning and haul my bones out of bed. She’s everything.
But one fine day she’s gonna be fully grown up and gone, and then what?
Who the fuck am I gonna be?
The funny man on the radio who alternates love advice with wild late-night conspiracy rumors, I guess. The dude who puts out fires.
Because I’d rather focus on other people’s problems than that blank sheet of paper. And that’s what has me laughing, completely absorbed in my buddies as we trade tips and horror stories back and forth about our kids.
It’s a weeknight, though, and before I know it I gotta get home to make sure Andrea does, too.
My beer’s worn off. I’m clearheaded as I clap my guys on the shoulder and stand.
That’s when I catch sight of Justin, who sure as hell ain’t clearheaded at all.
He’s slumped over a barstool, head on the bar, damn near drooling. His fingers are curled stubbornly in a half-filled beer mug’s handle while the bartender tries uneasily to tug it away from a grip that just won’t relax.
Goddammit, poor kid.
I have an inkling why he’s gone all soggy tonight.
He always does around this time of year.
Something about the dead of winter brings out the loss in a whole mess of people in this little town, not just yours truly.
Sighing, I weave my way through the crowd of people wandering to the exit, make my way over to the bar, and hold up a hand to the bartender.
“Hey, man, I got it,” I say. “Leave him to me.”
The bartender, Bruce, gives me a wary look, then nods, his plump hand falling away. “I need him out of here in fifteen minutes,” he says. “Coming up on last call. I already took his car keys. He one of your guys?”
“Yeah, he’s on the crew. It’s okay. I’m sober. I’ll give him a lift.”
Another suspicious look before the bartender slips away. I frown, leaning down to try to peer at Justin’s face, but all I get is a mop of black curls and a hint of his brow. He’s buried himself in his folded forearms.
“Yo, Justin,” I say. “Hey, man. It’s me. Let me get you home.”
For a minute, I think he might actually be blackout drunk. Unconscious.
Shit.
I might just have to carry him at this rate.
But then he lets out a soft gurgle in the back of his throat. Not just the booze, it’s ragged with grief. I think if he were a little more drunk, he’d be crying. If he were a little more sober, he’d be fighting it.
Where he is now is no man’s land.
It’s an awful, heartbreaking place where you hear wounded animal growls coming from a grown man’s throat.
“Everybody dies here,” he whispers, slurring his words, and I’m wondering how many damn beers he’s had. “Everybody. Maybe she didn’t die here...but they brought her body back. They brought her body back to lay it home.”
Fuck.
Yeah.
Yeah, I know what this is about.
Justin’s young enough to be my kid, almost. Twenty-seven.
And he was a kid one time, with the big Paradise Hotel fire almost a decade ago.
These days, everybody can’t shut up about the Heroes of Heart’s Edge.
You wanna talk about a real hero long before we hooked up, though?
Talk about Constance Bast.
Justin’s ma.
A lot of folks died the night that hotel burned, but she managed to get a hell of a lot of people out of there, people who would’ve been trapped if she hadn’t stepped up.
She’d just been the receptionist.
She was never meant to be a martyr.
I still remember.
I wasn’t too old back then either. Just a junior on the fire crew between tours serving Uncle Sam. And that woman in the debris, covered in soot, she’d shown bravery I didn’t see again till Afghanistan.
She’d been okay, at first.
Until she’d collapsed, hacking up a bloody, black mess.
“Justin.” I nudge his shoulder gently. “Thinkin’ about your ma tonight, huh?”
“Chief?”
“Yeah, dude. It’s me.”
“F-forty-three days,” he rasps, and my throat knots. It’s so wretched, so awful. “She held on for forty-three days.”