Page 73 of Falling for My Grumpy Fireman

They were never mine. Nobody hired me. Neither one ever walked through my door, and a matchmaker without a client is a woman minding somebody else's business, no matter how good her eyes are.

Lord, do I wish they'd hired me. Because every professional instinct I own is screaming to drive out to Juniper Lane and fix it. Sit that girl down. Tell her what I see when he looks at her, because I see it plain as a brand, and she is about to leave town believing the opposite of the truth.

I don't go.

First rule of the work, the one Gran never wrote down because she didn't have to: you cannot want it more than they do. You can set the table. You cannot eat for them. Whatever those two are driving toward, they have to hit it or miss it themselves.

So, I sit in my grandmother's building with my perfect ledger, wanting things for people who never asked me to, at a volume that ought to be audible from the road.

That's when I hear the truck.

James comes through the side door backward, which is how I know his hands are full.

"Don't get up." He sets a paper sack on the table. "I got the brisket plate. Extra pickles, no onions, cornbread instead of the roll. And sweet tea, the big one, because you forget to drink water when you're doing books."

I look at the sack. Then at him.

"I never told you the cornbread thing."

"You didn't have to." He pushes his glasses up his nose. "You give the roll to the birds every time. The cornbread's gone before the brisket is."

Watching gets you what people can't help showing you. He does it too, my careful man. He does it without knowing it has a name.

"There's more." He goes back out to the truck and returns with a hinge. An honest-to-God brass hinge, still in its hardware store sleeve. "For the storage room door. The one that drops when you open it past halfway."

"I mentioned that door one time."

"You mentioned it once out loud." He's already got a screwdriver out of his jacket. Who carries a screwdriver in a jacket. "You fight it every time you carry linens through. You put your hip into it. One of these days it's your hip or the door, and I like your hip."

"Counselor." I put a hand to my chest. "In the church of my grandmother."

"I'm also a minister. I can absolve myself."

He fixes the door while I eat. It takes him eleven minutes and he narrates none of it, and when the door swings clean and silent he looks prouder than he did the night he spent a hundred dollars winning me a ten-dollar teddy bear.

Then he sees the chairs.

Two hundred folding chairs from the volunteer appreciation supper, racked wrong by volunteers who mean well and stack like raccoons. He takes off his jacket.

"You don't have to."

"I want to."

Here's what I learn over the next hour: James Parker, attorney, minister, councilman, a man who has organized estates, a congregation, and a municipal budget, cannot fold a chair. He pinches his finger twice. He gets one stuck half-open and negotiates with it. He racks an entire row backward and defends the orientation like it's a closing argument.

I laugh until I have to sit down on the stage steps.

"They're chairs, Rue." He's flushed and grinning and there's a smear of dust across his shirt. "The literature on them is thin."

"You read literature on chairs."

"I would if it existed."

He laughs at his own line then. Head back, unguarded, the laugh that made me look twice at him a year before I let myself look twice.

And my laugh is late.

Two seconds. Maybe less. Because in the space where my laugh belongs, I am checking his face. Reading it the way I'd read a client across the intake table. Looking for the other expression, the one from the parking lot, the soft lit-from-somewhere-old one he aimed at a silver car and has never once aimed at me. I search his whole face in the time it takes a heart to beat twice, and it isn't there. There's nothing there but James, dusty and pleased with himself, laughing at chairs in my grandmother's hall.