Summer of Fire - Linda Jacobs [90]
It was his turn to wince.
She bent to explore first one knee and then the other. Her fingers traced the length of the three-inch scars, matched pairs along the inside and outside of each kneecap. “Sports?” This explained why she had occasionally noticed Steve limping.
“An accident.”
She suspected the air tragedy that had taken his family, but he did not volunteer. He made a move to go and she backed away.
In his kitchen, copper pots hung from a wrought-iron rack. Repeated scrubbing had worn the linoleum until the red and gray squares were blurred into a muddy continuum. The dining area, with a pine table between corner windows, overlooked another row of staff housing.
Steve opened the icebox to reveal a rotting cucumber, three cans of Olympia beer and some Calistoga mineral water. “This is the first I’ve been home in a while. Stick around until I get to a store and I’ll make you coq au vin.”
Clare’s opinion of him continued to change. First the piano and now he professed to be a chef. Of course, the tuna salad he’d whipped up on Mount Washburn had been tasty.
She took the beer he offered and drank, the carbonation stinging her raw throat. Uncapping the Calistoga, Steve drank off half of the quart in three gulps.
Clare lifted her Oly and raised an inquiring brow.
“I’m off the sauce.” He toasted with his water.
Something inside her lifted at his commitment to stay sober. Being on a mountain was one thing, handing your guest a beer and not having one yourself must be tougher.
She bent to take off her heavy-soled boots. In sock feet, she carried her can into the living room. “Do you know Moonlight Sonata?” She sank onto the sofa.
“I know the piece. I don’t play.”
That was odd. Everything else here fit her expectation. A set of packed bookshelves held technical books on biology and geology, along with a well-worn collection of popular paperbacks. Bleached animal skulls sat alongside specimens of turquoise, amethyst, and other rocks she couldn’t identify.
She set her drink on the pine coffee table and lifted an irregular black stone. It was heavy and smooth, but the concoidal shape tapered to sharp edges.
“Obsidian,” Steve said. “The Nez Perce believed it had healing powers.”
Holding the rock, she asked, “Do you think it could help me forget today?”
“Only you can answer that.”
She stared into the stone’s glassy depths. Inside was a vortex, somehow dizzying. Glancing toward the darkness outside the door, she noted the bars on its small window.
Steve took the obsidian from her. “You’ve been through a lot.” He set the rock down. “But there were a few things about today I wouldn’t change.” His steady eyes suggested he was as aware of her as she was of him.
Clare looked for a distraction. “Your work?” She nodded toward a black-and-white photo of a snowshoe hare huddled at the base of an aspen. On the same wall hung a view of the Grand Teton emerging from morning fog, alongside a baby elk with spindly legs threatening collapse.
“I put in a darkroom beside my study,” Steve said.
Something about the process of capturing a wilderness image and putting it into a frame underlined Clare’s ephemeral association with the Yellowstone country. Her family had once lived on this land, while she merely visited, welcome to take snapshots, leave footprints, and go home.
Although she ran out of small talk, she felt more was required. “Long day,” she began and then realized that she was taking them back to the Hellroaring.
“Very long.” He shifted his weight from one foot to the other. The caring in his eyes, overlain by something deeper, decided her.
Curling her feet beneath her on the couch, she confessed, “Today isn’t the first time I’ve had somebody die in a fire with me.”
Steve came to sit beside her.
“Frank inspired me every day. He kept the station meals on par with a chichi restaurant. He shorted-sheeted our bunks.” She gave a giggle that surprised her.
Steve smiled.
Once more, she felt solemn. “We were together on the hose. When the roof came