Summer of Fire - Linda Jacobs [41]
It was a shame about Steve Haywood. Where Deering was bold and cocky, Steve had a kind of vulnerability that made her want to put a smile into his eyes.
Steve opened his eyes to darkness. As the familiar shadows of his bedroom furniture seemed to harden before his eyes, he clung to wisps of dream.
When all else disappeared, the ghost of a sweet face remained. Not Susan, but Clare, who’d looked earnest and caring when he’d opened his eyes beside Yellowstone Lake. He focused on her, nut brown from the sun, tousled short hair falling over her forehead. He’d really wanted to have dinner with her, but what could he expect after the wonderful impression he’d made thus far?
Rolling over, he realized that he wasn’t going to be able to get back to sleep. Even in darkness, he envisioned the picture of Susan on the bedside table.
What would she think if she knew he dreamed of another woman?
His bare feet found summer’s grit on the hardwood hall floor as he headed for the kitchen without turning on a light. There the window revealed a streetlamp’s bluish glow between the rows of park housing and storage buildings. The clock on the fifties-vintage stove ticked, its hands pointing to three-forty.
Susan lay beneath the earth, dust to dust. Her lithe body, her spirited hands that coaxed music from everything, including, and most especially, him--that was but a memory.
He opened the cabinet beneath the sink. The last bottle in the house was the gin that had been on the coffee table when Moru came by. Steve preferred whiskey or bourbon, but he swallowed anyway, a deep convulsive contraction. And again.
Susan was ancient history, some black-and-white daguerreotype, no more alive than a picture of Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce or the stark image of charred trees against the night.
Ashes to ashes. The liquor burned and he drank again. The pungent aroma was hot with alcohol and laced with the exotic licorice, lemon, and juniper that gave gin its distinctive nose.
Why are you doing this to yourself? Clare’s eyes were pools of sadness that had reached to include him.
Susan would have wanted him to live, not to sleepwalk through his existence.
Steve gripped the edge of the sink with one hand while he poured, hearing the gin gurgle down the drain.
“Up early, Steve?” Ranger Shad Dugan said from behind his desk.
It was just past six. In full uniform, Dugan had probably been working since five, moving his mountain of paperwork. A big sandy-haired man with a ruddy face, Dugan had over twenty-five years in park management and told everyone that red tape was the worst part of his job.
“We need to talk,” Steve said.
Dugan removed his tortoise-shell reading glasses and indicated a chair.
Steve sat and held his coffee in hands that already trembled. That didn’t usually hit until noon, but pouring the booze down the drain instead of his throat came with the consequence. “Moru came to see me yesterday.”
Dugan nodded. “What’d you decide?”
This was going to be tricky. How to explain that he wanted to change, but the last thing he needed was one of those funny farm places. The ones where you were miraculously cured as soon as the maximum number of days on your insurance expired.
“I know I’ve got a problem,” he began, “and that something’s gotta give.”
“That’s a start.” Dugan might have been playing poker, for all the expression in his eyes.
“Here’s the thing, though . . . I want to stay in the park this summer. With the fires, I feel like I’m needed.” Steve tried to go slowly, but the words tumbled out. “I would hate to see the natural burn policy scrapped without a proper review.”
“There’ll be plenty of