Page 37 of Falling for My Grumpy Fireman

I walk to my truck grinning like an idiot, first time in two years, and I've got one thought going around and around like tones dropping in an empty station:

I am in so much trouble.

And nine weeks is not going to be enough.

Chapter eleven

Fall Risk

NELLIE

The sky over Willowbend turns green at four o'clock, and every nurse in Texas knows what green means.

Green means the ER fills up by seven. Green means chainsaw hands and ladder falls and one fool who tried to move his boat. Green means go home while you can.

The charge nurse cuts half of us loose at five. "Go home while the roads still know they're roads." I drive with the radio hollering about a gulf storm nobody's naming yet, wind shoving the car sideways at the four-way stop.

I'm wearing his flannel. Have been since he left it.

That's the other thing. Owen Peterson has been in this town barely two weeks and the last three days he keeps happening to me.

The morning after the corridor, he happens to be leaning on the ER desk when I come off a code, holding two coffees.

"How do you know how I take my coffee?"

He shrugs. That's it. That's the answer, all of it.

Then he walks off like he didn't hand me a live grenade in a paper cup.

The next day I swing by the station with two dozen kolaches I happened to buy. For no reason.

Half the town has money on us. That afternoon, June leans over the bakery counter with my change and doesn't let go of it.

"I've got Labor Day," she says. "Is that realistic?"

"I leave in eight weeks, June."

She pats my hand. "Sure you do, honey."

Debbie's worse. Yesterday I come up to the nurses' station and there's a drawing on the whiteboard. A little flame. A little heart. A plus sign between them.

Debbie's standing next to it drinking her coffee like it's the weather report.

"What is that."

"Art."

"Erase it."

"Can't." She taps the marker against the board. "It's load-bearing now."

I have a rule. Eight weeks left on the contract, and the rule is the rule.

The rule does not explain why I've stopped sleeping on the left side of the bed. Like I'm saving room.

By eight the power's out on Juniper Lane. By nine the rain's going sideways and something upstairs makes a sound like the house getting shot.

I take the stairs with a flashlight. The attic window is gone. Not cracked. Gone. A live oak limb came through it like a fist, and rain is pouring onto forty years of somebody else's Christmas boxes.