Summer of Fire - Linda Jacobs [24]
“Excuse me,” Clare murmured to Deering.
She approached Steve from behind. Maybe because she’d rescued him, it disappointed her to see him like this. Before she knew what she was going to say, the words came out. “Don’t you think you’ve had enough?”
Steve turned with the slow care of a man who’d had too much to drink. Her head barely clearing his shoulder, she looked up at him steadily.
“You again.” It sounded as though he was accusing her of something.
A flush rose from her chest and spread across her cheeks. “Why are you doing this to yourself?”
His silver-gray eyes went wide. “Whaddaya mean? I’m just having a few to celebrate . . .” He steadied himself on the bar. “ . . . tomorra’s visit of the honorable Secretary of the Interior and his muckey-mucks.” He made a bowing gesture that indicated obeisance, then met her eyes. She recognized the look of sadness and defeat she’d seen lately in her mirror.
Maybe she conveyed something, for the bluster went out of him. “I’m sorry. I shoulda thanked you . . . saving my life.”
She started to soften, but he caught his boot toe in the bar’s brass foot rail and lost his balance. Blind anger that she knew was irrational turned her back toward Deering with a tart, “Someday when you’re sober you can thank me properly.”
CHAPTER FIVE
July 27
The next morning Clare found it hard to believe there could be any threat to this pristine forest. She rode in a troop carrier with ten other firefighters on their way to divert the North Fork from Old Faithful. Almost everyone had his or her head down trying to catch a last few minutes of sleep despite the hard bench.
Although the rising sun angled through the trees on the small forest track, its warmth did not reach beneath the truck’s canvas tarp. In Houston, the July temperature and humidity had both hovered near one hundred.
Before leaving, she’d visited her mother. They had sat in Constance’s back yard in suburban Bellaire, ignoring the glass-walled office building that towered over the squat, one-story bungalow. The roar of traffic on Loop 610 formed a constant stream of white noise.
Pouring lemonade from a sweating pitcher, Constance said, “Are you sure about this Wyoming, dear? You’re still suffering over your . . . friend.” Her arch pause suggested Frank might have been more than a co-worker.
That was ridiculous. Frank had treated Clare like the big brother she’d never had, being an only child. Without bothering to correct her mother, she said, “That’s precisely the point. I need a change and my job will be waiting when I come back.”
She didn’t say that one more night in Houston, where nightmares wakened her with almost hourly regularity, was more than she could stand.
“But, dear, Devon is at a delicate age.” A stranger might believe that Constance, with her wide dark eyes and innocent delivery, was being sweet. Clare knew better. “Mother,” she warned, “one of the A & M trainers called a friend in fire command at Yellowstone. Garrett Anderson is expecting me.”
“Of course, dear, but Devon . . .” Constance pushed back her silver hair where it had fallen over her forehead.
Clare sipped her mother’s perfect lemonade deliberately. “Taking care of Devon is just an excuse. She could stay with you, but you haven’t been willing to have her overnight since she set her mattress on fire.”
“Can’t you teach her safety? And you a firefighter.” Constance’s tone said she regarded her daughter’s profession as no better than ditch digger.
Clare busied herself selecting a fat oatmeal cookie from the symmetrical arrangement on a platter.
“She still smokes, you know.” Constance lowered her voice as though Devon could overhear. “I smell it on her.”
“A lot of the other kids smoke. She gets it on her clothes from being around them.” Clare defended Devon even though she knew her daughter probably did smoke, and lied about it.
“I hope you’re right about her being okay at Jay’s while you’re gone. Her visits there are usually shorter, and you know that fish and family . . .