8
Natalie
I’m exhausted when I pull up to Lisa Dorn’s house. She lives in an adorable little neighborhood, her house a cute Craftsman. It’s another beautiful late-spring day, and flowers fill planter boxes in yards all along the street.
The trucks parked nearby with firefighters’ stickers on their back windows tell me the guys are still here. I’m not trying to avoid Cole, but the sight of his truck creates a tangle of nerves inside my stomach. I haven’t seen him since I left him at the house yesterday morning, though he’s texted a few times. I only answered one.
Resigned to facing Cole in the aftermath of coming on to him—I have to do it sooner or later—I grab my purse and notepad and head inside.
Lisa greets me, flustered and exhausted. Her eyes are puffy and red, her face drawn, her brown hair up in a messy bun. “The babysitter took the kids to the park.”
“That’ll be a nice break for you.”
She’s only thirty-eight, and she’s faced with taking over complete control of the finances and raising her three daughters alone. It breaks my heart. It’s also a wakeup call. If Evan and I had started having kids as soon as we got married, the way I wanted, I could be raising kids alone as well. While I wouldn’t want that for myself or my kids, part of me regrets not having something of Evan left to hold on to.
“Help yourself,” she says, gesturing toward the kitchen. “I just have to throw in some laundry.”
Lisa was in the middle of a home renovation when Kip died. He was at an amusement park with his kids when his heart attack struck. In the fire service, heart attacks are considered presumptive, so when it happens, on or off duty, it’s considered an on-the-job death. And I’m grateful for that now, as I work through Lisa’s finances. She would be in a shitload of trouble without the public service officer’s death benefit.
I wander through the living room toward the back of the house where their addition has been finished by the helping hands of Kip’s fellow firefighters. I follow the muffled voices and laughter and find the guys working in the backyard. It’s Cole, Tucker, Logan, and two volunteer firefighters whose names escape me.
Folding my arms, I lean against the side of the fridge and watch them. It’s warm today, so they all have their shirts off, and there is some serious beefcake out there.
They’re betting on something. Tucker’s talking about odds and collecting money. Cole’s setting up the rules. He seems carefree today, loose and happy. It makes me smile. Evan’s death was hell on Cole too. They’d been the best of friends since they’d been in kindergarten. Cole had also been there the night Evan died, and I know he feels like he bears some of the responsibility somehow.
“Line of tile,” Cole says. “Two minutes.”
Cole has set down a perfect layer of tile adhesive with a trowel. He wipes his hands on his jeans and gets into a wide stance over the area to be tiled. Logan hovers over the piled terra-cotta tiles. Tucker holds money in one hand, his watch in the other.
Logan gets his fingers around the edges of the first tile.
Cole claps then holds his hands out, ready to receive. “Let’s do this.”
Tucker starts the countdown. “Three, two, one. Go.”
He presses the Start button, and Logan tosses the first tile. Cole catches it effortlessly, drops it into place, then catches the next. And the next. Their speed, fluidity, and accuracy astound me.
Cole gets adhesive on his hands that’s apparently still slippery, and the next tile slides around before he gets it into place.
The guys watching “ooh” at the slip, then “ahh” at the save.
Catch, place, move. Catch, place, move.
While the guys are cheering and yelling, I’m lost in the sight of Cole’s upper body. The way his lats and biceps roll beneath his skin. The way his abs flex. My mind fills with the sight of him propped up on the arm of my sofa, the memory of his hot skin on mine, the taste of him on my tongue.
“We’ve got this.” Cole’s assurance to Logan pulls me back to the present.
With three tiles left, Cole counts them down as he drops them into place. “Three, two, one—”
The last tile snaps in Cole’s hands, falls into the mastic, and spatters the adhesive across his face and chest. I gasp and cover my mouth to stifle a surprised bubble of laughter. The other guys think it’s hilarious and don’t hold back, getting a good belly laugh out of the event.
Cole sputters, spits adhesive, and straightens with gray goop splashed across his skin. “That doesn’t count. It was a defective tile.”
“Totally defective,” Logan agrees.
“Now, girls, don’t be sore losers,” Tucker says.
Logan and Cole grumble, but drop to the ground, burpee style, shoulder to shoulder, braced on their toes in plank position.
Tucker turns on some hip-hop song and says, “Go.”
Logan and Cole trade off between straight plank and forearm plank—up, down, up, down—to the beat of the music and in time with each other.
After about twenty seconds, I wince. “Ouch.”
“How fucking long is this song?” Cole says.
“It might or might not be the extended version,” Tucker says.
When the song finally ends, Cole drops, chest first, to the ground, Logan right beside him. The guys cheer, and Cole pushes himself up, then offers a hand to Logan.
Cole grabs a towel and wipes the adhesive from his face. His joy is palpable, his smile bright, his laugh deep. This is exactly where he belongs, with his firefighter brothers. I never had siblings, but I imagine this is how it would look to have a bunch of brothers working on a family project.
I’m just about to turn away when he glances at the house. He catches sight of me through the sliding glass door, and the moment our eyes meet, I feel a click in my chest.
“They’re doing a great job, aren’t they?” Lisa comes up beside me, startling me from the intimacy of our locked gazes.
“They sure are.” I turn away from the door and look into the dining room, where papers cover the tabletop.
Our first meeting was to make funeral arrangements. The second was to handle all the death-related forms and actions required to gain access to death benefits and tie up loose ends.
Today, we’re focusing on all the financial duties Lisa’s husband used to take care of, namely bills and investments. I’m hoping we can finish this up today to limit her suffering and let her move on to grieving. And, yeah, I’m ready to be finished with tasks that bring back the dark memories of life after Evan.
When he died, I was so overcome with grief that I couldn’t do the simplest task. Facing the same paperwork now spread out across Lisa’s dining room table completely overwhelmed me. I don’t know how I would have gotten through it without Cole and my mother. I didn’t meet Tina until after Evan died, so I didn’t have her support back then.
That situation instigated my desire to join the benevolent fund in an effort to offer the kind of support I should have received from someone in the position, but never did. When Evan died, the woman with my current position had been self-absorbed and completely unhelpful. She'd never dealt with a firefighter's death and acted so worried that she might catch some type of husband-death virus from me that she stayed as far away as possible. Having lost Evan, I knew what it felt like to need more support and not be able to get it. I also thought it would help me grieve Evan’s death.