My new fire chief put me face-down in the gravel behind the station while fourteen volunteers watched, right after he told every one of them, “Look at her. Built like a coat rack and twice as useful.” He’d run that company for twenty-nine years. He had no idea what I’d been doing since I was seven.
I needed that pager.
Eleven weeks of night classes, $340 of boots I’d bought with my own tips, and none of it counted unless Chief Clyde Dillard signed one sheet of paper.
He’d never once said my name right.
It was my fourth Thursday training night in Wakefield, ninety-seven degrees at a quarter to seven, and the heat came up off that lot in waves.
The fourteen of us stood in a line by the bay doors in navy T-shirts and ball caps.
“Gallegos,” he said. He said it Gah-LEG-us. “Front.”
I stepped out.
I didn’t hurry, and I didn’t look around for anybody’s face to help me.
I think that’s what got to him.
Clyde was sixty-three and thick through the middle, gray hair buzzed so short it looked like sandpaper, his tan uniform shirt dark under both arms.
He’d been chief since before I was born.
Grown men who’d volunteered twenty years still called him sir in the grocery store.
He walked a slow circle around me.
Gravel cracked under his boots.
Somebody’s radio went off on the tailboard of the engine, and nobody reached for it.
“You think you’re dragging a two-hundred-pound man out of a basement?” he said. “You?”
He leaned in until I could smell the coffee and the chew on him.
Then he turned to the line and said the coat rack thing.
Two of the older guys laughed, because they always laughed.
Aleksandra, the other new girl, didn’t. She stared at her shoes.
I kept my eyes on the flagpole behind his head.
“Answer me,” he said.
“Yes, Chief.”
That was it.
Two words, flat, nothing in them at all.
They landed on him like I’d spit.
His neck went the color of a sunburned tourist.
“YES, CHIEF,” he said, in a high little voice that was supposed to be mine. “That’s what you’ve got for me?”
Lieutenant Max Hussein shifted his weight by the hose rack. He opened his mouth and closed it again.
Virginia Lindgren, who’d run the station radio since 1989, set her clipboard down on the hood of her car.
Clyde stepped into me and shoved me with both hands in the chest.
I went down hard.
Gravel bit into my palms and my cheek, and dust went up around me like somebody had dropped a bag of flour.
Somebody said “Jesus,” and a helmet hit the concrete.
“UP,” Clyde said. “Get UP, Gallegos.”
I got up.
There was grit in my teeth. I didn’t wipe my face.
He was already turning back to the line, grinning, the grin of a man telling a joke for the hundredth time.
And something in me went very quiet.
It was the same quiet I’d had on a mat since second grade.
He swung back around and reached for the collar of my shirt.
I don’t remember deciding anything.
I stepped in under his arm, took his sleeve and his belt, turned my hip into him, and let his own weight finish it.
Two hundred and forty pounds went over my shoulder.
He landed flat on his back with a sound like a feed sack coming off a truck.
Nobody moved.
The pop machine by the bay door kept humming. Its root beer button had been stuck since June.
Then one of the rookies snorted and tried to turn it into a cough, and that was worse.
Clyde rolled onto his side.
He got one knee under him.
Dust all down the back of that tan shirt.
His eyes found me and stayed there.
“You’re gonna be sorry for that,” he said. “You hear me? You are DONE in this county.”
I didn’t back up.
I set my feet a little wider than my shoulders, the way my coach used to tap my ankles until I got it right.
“You put hands on me ONCE, Chief,” I said, like I was telling him his tire looked low. “Put them on me twice and you’ll learn I WON’T BE GENTLE.”
Nobody on that lot made a sound.
Max had his phone halfway out of his pocket, and he didn’t put it back.
Clyde stood all the way up, breathing through his mouth.
But the red was draining out of his face.
Something colder was coming in behind it.
He looked at my feet. Then my hands. Then my face, like he was trying to place it.
“Where the hell did you learn that?” he said.
I didn’t answer.
I just stood there in the heat while he worked it out, about four seconds too late.
He hadn’t been bullying the new girl.
He’d been picking a fight.
The flagpole
The answer was judo.
Nineteen years of it, three nights a week, on blue mats in the basement of First Methodist.
My mother ran a club down there for kids whose parents couldn’t pay for karate at the strip mall.
My mother was also my coach. The ankle taps were hers.
He got there on his own. I saw it land on him.
“Laverne’s girl,” he said.
He said it to himself more than to me.
He couldn’t say my name right, but he said hers like he’d said it a hundred times.
I didn’t know he knew my mother. She had said his name in our house exactly once.
I kept my feet where they were.
Clyde brushed at the front of his shirt. It didn’t help. Gravel dust doesn’t come off tan.
“Lieutenant,” he said. “Put that away.”
Max looked at the phone in his own hand like somebody else had put it there.
He didn’t put it away. He didn’t hold it up either.
He let it hang down by his leg, the screen still lit.
The two older guys who’d laughed were very interested in the engine’s back tire.
Aleksandra had picked up her helmet.
She was holding it against her stomach with one arm.
Her phone was in her other hand, down by her hip.
It always was. She had a little boy at home with a sitter, and the sitter texted every hour.
Clyde didn’t look at any of them.
He looked at Virginia.
Virginia was still by her car, her clipboard on the hood. She hadn’t picked it back up.
“Virginia,” he said. “What time you got?”
She turned her wrist over and looked.
“Six fifty-two, Clyde.”
He nodded. He seemed satisfied with that, the way a man is satisfied when a pie comes out of the oven when the recipe said it would.
Then he pointed at the bay door.
“Training’s over,” he said. “Everybody go home. Gallegos, you don’t come back here until you hear from me.”
Nobody went home.
They stood around in clumps on the gravel and didn’t look at me, which is its own kind of looking.
I spat the grit out by the hose rack. My cheek had started to sting.
Clyde was halfway to the side door when he stopped and turned around.
He wasn’t talking to me.
“Write that down,” he said.
Three hundred and forty dollars
I bought the boots in June at the farm store out by the interstate.
They were the real ones, leather, the ones the county class said to get.
I paid for them in tens and fives from a coffee can.
I’ve waited tables at the diner on Route 9 since I was seventeen. The can was my tips from most of May.
The man at the register asked if they were for my boyfriend.
I said they were for me. He asked what size my boyfriend wore.
That was the first time anybody laughed at me about the fire company. Clyde was only the loudest.
I wanted that pager for a reason I don’t usually say out loud.
When I was fourteen, the house behind ours caught fire at two in the morning.
Wakefield is twenty-two minutes from the county ambulance and nine minutes from everything else.
The volunteers were there in six.
I stood in my yard in my pajamas and watched a woman my mother’s age come out of that smoke with an old man over her shoulders.
He weighed more than she did.
I know because he was my neighbor and he used to complain about his knees.
So when Clyde asked if I thought I could drag a two-hundred-pound man out of a basement, I did think so.
I’d seen it done.
When I signed up for the class in May, I told my mother at the kitchen table.
She was cutting coupons. She stopped.
“Is Dillard still chief?” she said.
That was the once. I told her I thought so.
She went back to the coupons, slower.
After a while she said, “Don’t let anybody put you on a floor you didn’t pick.”
She’d said that on the mat my whole life. I never heard her say it anywhere else.
The class was Monday and Wednesday nights at the county center, eleven weeks.
The Thursday training nights at the station were how the company got a look at you.
At the end there was the sheet.
It was one page, white, with my name typed at the top. Two lines at the bottom.
The first line said Recommended for full membership and had a space for the chief.
The second said Approved by vote of the membership and had a space for the date of the meeting.
Max showed it to me my first night. He tapped the first line.
“That’s the one,” he said. “The second one’s never gone against him.”
The meetings were the first Tuesday of the month, in the room behind the bays with the folding chairs and the coffee urn.
That last Thursday in July, I got to the station at four-thirty.
The boots were still stiff. I wanted to walk the lot in them before anybody was there to see me do it.
Clyde’s truck was already parked by the side door.
The radio room has a window onto the hall. Virginia’s computer sits under it, beside her shelf of green ledgers.
She keeps one of those ledgers for every year since 1989.
She writes down every call, every training night, every truck that leaves, even the weather.
She wasn’t in yet. She never came in before six.
Clyde was sitting in her chair.
He hunched over that keyboard with two fingers out, like he was afraid of it.
Everybody knew he didn’t touch Virginia’s computer. He called it the TV.
When I walked past the window in my new boots, he turned the screen off.
He didn’t say hello. I didn’t think about it again for four days.
I drove home that Thursday night with my palms burning on the steering wheel.
There was gravel in the toe of my left boot. I could feel it every time I hit the brake.
When I pulled in, my mother’s kitchen light was on. She’d left it on for me since high school.
I sat in the driveway and didn’t go in.
After a while the light went off.
Saturday’s email
It came at 8:06 on Saturday morning, while I was rolling silverware at the diner.
It was from the county training coordinator. I’d never gotten an email from him that wasn’t about a schedule.
My Fire I certification was on hold.
The chief of my company had filed an incident report.
The email gave me the words from it, in quotes, like they were already true.
Insubordination.
Physical refusal of instruction.
Assault on an officer.
A review would follow within thirty days. In the meantime, the chief’s recommendation for my removal would go to the membership at its next regular meeting.
The next regular meeting was Tuesday.
I read it three times standing by the coffee machine.
Then the cook rang the bell for an order and I took two plates out to a booth without knowing what was on them.
It was all over town by eleven.
A regular, in every Saturday for the patty melt, held his cup up for a refill.
“Heard you went after Clyde,” he said.
He said it friendly, the way you’d say heard you got a new car.
I filled his cup. I said I’d heard that too.
He laughed like I’d made a joke. Maybe I had.
On my break I sat in my car behind the dumpster and texted Max.
I’d thought about it all night.
He was the lieutenant, he’d been there, and he’d had his phone out the whole time. I’d seen the screen lit by his leg.
I asked him to send me what he had.
He didn’t text back. He called.
“Jordyn,” he said. He was the only one at the station who said it right. “Don’t do this.”
“He put me on the ground, Max.”
“I know what he did. I was standing there.”
“Then send me the video.”
There was a long breath on his end. A lawnmower somewhere behind him, then a screen door.
“You know how long I’ve been on that company?” he said. “Thirty-one years. You know how long he’s been chief?”
“Twenty-nine.”
“His word’s been good in this county since before you were born. You throw him on his back in front of the whole line, and you think a video’s gonna make that look better for you?”
“It was the second time he grabbed me.”
“It’s gonna look like a little girl who knows karate hurt a sixty-three-year-old man.”
“Judo,” I said.
He didn’t laugh.
“My boy’s on the list for the paid county job,” Max said. “Clyde writes the letters for that list. You understand what I’m telling you?”
I did. I didn’t say anything.
“Go to the meeting,” he said. “Say you’re sorry. Say it was the heat. He likes it when people say sorry.”
“Send me the video, Max.”
“I can’t,” he said. “I deleted it before I got out of the lot.”
First Methodist
On Sunday afternoons my mother teaches the little kids.
Nine of them that week, in white jackets two sizes too big because she buys them used and lets them grow into them.
They fall down on purpose, which is the whole first year. You learn to fall before you learn anything else.
I helped her with them the way I had since I was fifteen.
She saw my cheek when I walked in. She didn’t say a thing about it until the last parent’s car had pulled out.
Then she handed me the push broom.
We swept the mats in the order we always swept them, her side and then mine.
The basement smelled the way it always smells, like old coffee from the kitchen upstairs and the floor cleaner she buys by the gallon.
I told her all of it while I swept.
The line, the flagpole, the shove. The second grab, and what I did. The email. Max on the phone.
She kept sweeping. She swept the same corner a long time.
When I got to the part about Clyde looking at my face and saying her name, she stopped.
“What did he say to the line?” she said. “Before.”
“That I was built like a coat rack.”
“And twice as useful,” she said.
I looked at her.
She leaned the broom against the wall. Very carefully, like it might fall and wake somebody.
My mother is fifty-two. She’s five-foot-one. She has a brown belt she got at thirty-eight because she started late.
She has been the calmest person in every room I’ve ever seen her in, including the hospital the night my father’s heart quit.
She sat down on the edge of the mat with her knees up.
“I made it four Thursdays,” she said.
That was all she said for a while.
I sat down next to her. I didn’t ask her anything. You don’t, with her. You wait.
“It was before you,” she said. “Your dad thought it was a good idea. We needed the stipend. They paid twelve dollars a call back then.”
“You were on the company?”
“I was on the line.”
She looked at her own hands. The left one has a knuckle that never went back right.
“I didn’t know any of this then,” she said, and touched the mat. “I started this after.”
“After what?”
She didn’t answer that.
She got up and went to the closet where she keeps the spare jackets and the first-aid kit and the box of trophies nobody ever claimed.
She was in there a long time. Long enough for me to hear the furnace kick on.
When she came out, she had something folded square in her hands. She put it down on the mat between us.
A navy T-shirt. Soft from washing, the collar gone a little wavy.
She turned it over so I could see the back.
WAKEFIELD VOL. FIRE, it said in white letters. And under that, 1998.
The green ledgers
Virginia was in the radio room at nine on Monday morning, like my mother said she’d be.
I’d never been in there without a reason. I didn’t have a reason that I could have said out loud.
She was eating a hard-boiled egg out of a plastic bag. She looked at my cheek.
Then she looked at the hall behind me to see who else was there.
Nobody was. Clyde’s truck wasn’t in the lot.
“Your mother called me last night,” she said. “First time in twenty-eight years.”
She got up and closed the door.
“Which year?” she said, but she was already reaching.
The green ledgers go along the shelf by year, the gold numbers on the spines rubbed down to almost nothing on the old ones.
She took down 1998 without counting.
She knew where it was. She opened it to a page in September and turned it around on the desk for me.
Her handwriting hasn’t changed. Small, slanted, all capitals for anything that mattered.
Thurs. Training. 92 deg.
Probie L. GALLEGOS down on lot 1852.
C.D. report to county 1900.
And at the bottom of the page, the next Monday:
L. GALLEGOS resigned.
I read it twice.
Virginia didn’t say anything. She took down 2009.
A different month, a different temperature, a different set of initials. The same three lines.
Probie down on lot.
C.D. report to county.
Resigned Mon.
Then 2017. Then one more, from the spring before last, that I had to read slowly because her handwriting had gotten shakier.
Four women, counting my mother. Every one of them on her fourth Thursday.
In the 2017 entry, Virginia had written two words between quotation marks, in pencil, like she’d gone back and added them later.
“Coat rack.”
“You wrote it down,” I said.
“I wrote it down every time,” she said. “Writing it down is all I did.”
She picked up her egg and put it down again without eating it.
“I told myself somebody would come looking for these someday,” she said. “I told myself that for twenty-eight years.”
The side door banged out in the hall.
Virginia flipped the ledger shut. It was Aleksandra, with a paper folder of forms for the county, and her phone in her hand like always.
She stopped when she saw me through the window. She almost turned around.
I went out into the hall before she could.
She was twenty-two. She’d started the class two weeks after I did. Her fourth Thursday was two weeks away.
I told her that. I didn’t tell her about the ledgers.
I said she’d been standing in the line with her phone in her hand, the way she always held it.
“Did you get any of it?” I said.
She looked at the folder.
“I have a kid,” she said. “I need the stipend. They pay thirty a call now.”
“I know.”
“He’d have my name on a sheet by Friday.”
“He’s going to have your name on one anyway,” I said. “In two weeks.”
She looked at me then, for maybe a second.
Then she put the folder in Virginia’s tray through the window and went out the side door.
She didn’t let it slam.
4:52 p.m.
Virginia sat back down at her computer.
“He calls it the TV,” she said.
“I know. He was on it Thursday.”
She stopped with her hand on the mouse.
“What time Thursday?”
“Four-thirty. I came early to walk my boots in. He was in your chair. He turned the screen off when I walked by.”
She looked at me for a long moment. Then she put on the glasses she keeps on a string.
“I file his county reports for him,” she said. “Have for years. He can’t type and he won’t learn. He writes them out on a legal pad, and I put them in.”
“Did you put this one in?”
“No.”
She clicked through three screens. It’s an old machine. The fan in it sounds like a hair dryer.
Every person who uses the radio room console logs in with a code.
It’s a county rule, from after some kid prank-called a structure fire in the nineties. The computer keeps a list of every login.
She pulled the list up and turned the screen so we could both see it.
Thursday. DILLARD C — IN 16:41 — OUT 16:58.
Below that, in a different line, the one that said VIRGINIA L — IN 18:02.
Then she opened the county’s reporting site, where the station has one account and she has the password on a card taped under the keyboard.
Incident reports. Wakefield Volunteer Fire. Thursday.
There was one.
She clicked on it, and the report came up, and at the top in gray letters it said Submitted 07/30 16:52.
I read it standing behind her chair.
At approx. 1850 hrs during scheduled training, probationary member Gallegos refused instruction, became physical with this officer and is unfit for service. Recommend removal and county review.
Four fifty-two. Two hours before I stepped out of the line.
He’d sat in Virginia’s chair with two fingers and typed that I put my hands on him. Then he went out to the lot and waited for it to come true.
I thought about the shove.
I’d gone down and gotten up. I hadn’t touched him.
He’d turned back to the line, grinning, and I’d have stood there in the gravel all night with grit in my teeth.
But the report said physical. So he came back around for my collar.
He needed me to do something with my hands. If I hadn’t, I think he’d have kept reaching until I did.
Virginia didn’t say anything. She opened the 2017 ledger again and put her finger on a line I’d read past.
C.D. report to county 1700.
Training that night had started at six-thirty.
“I always wondered how he got them in so fast,” she said. “I thought he called the county from his truck.”
She sat there with her finger on that line.
Then she hit print. The printer under the desk took forever to wake up, the way it always does.
She made three copies of the receipt and three copies of the login list, and she stapled them in sets with the old stapler that sticks.
She handed me one set and kept the other two.
“He asked me the time on that lot,” she said. “I thought he wanted it for the log.”
She looked at the gray letters on the screen.
“He wanted to know how close he got.”
Folding chairs
The first Tuesday in August was ninety-one degrees, and the meeting room behind the bays had one window unit that dripped into a coffee can.
Twenty-two members came. Usually it was eleven, Virginia said. People had heard.
The meetings are open to the public. It’s in the township rules, on a framed sheet by the door that nobody reads.
My mother sat in the back row by the coffee urn, in the navy T-shirt from 1998.
I’d asked her that morning if she wanted to come. She said no. Then at six-forty she was in the car before I was.
Aleksandra wasn’t there. Her chair was empty at the end of the second row, where the probies sat.
Clyde ran the meeting from the table up front with Max on his right and Virginia on his left with the minutes.
He had on a clean tan shirt and his white chief’s helmet was on its hook on the wall behind him, where it always hung for meetings.
He went through the old business. A new nozzle. The pancake breakfast in September.
He was easy and slow and he made two jokes, and people laughed at both.
Then he picked up a sheet of paper.
“New business,” he said. “This isn’t something I enjoy.”
He read his report out loud. The same words, insubordination, physical refusal of instruction, assault on an officer, in the voice he used for the pancake breakfast.
“Twenty-nine years,” he said. “I’ve never once had a probie put hands on me. Not once.”
“I’ve been doing this since some of you were in diapers, and I’m telling you, this one’s not safe on a fire ground. She’s not safe to the men beside her. I recommend removal. Max?”
Max cleared his throat. He didn’t look at me.
“Motion on the floor is the chief’s recommendation,” he said. “Is there discussion before the vote?”
I stood up.
“Virginia has the minutes,” I said. “Could she read Thursday’s?”
Clyde laughed. “The minutes. Sure. Read the minutes, Virginia.”
Virginia stood. She didn’t read the minutes.
She read the login list first. Dillard, C., in at sixteen forty-one. Then the county receipt. Submitted sixteen fifty-two. Then the line from his report. At approximately eighteen-fifty hours.
She read the times in military, the way she reads everything on the radio, flat and clear.
Then she said, “Six fifty-two is what I told him on the lot. I wrote it down.”
It got quiet. Not all at once. From the front rows back.
“That’s a draft,” Clyde said. “Every chief writes ahead. You know how a probie’s gonna act by the fourth night. That’s thirty years of knowing people. That’s the job.”
Nobody said anything.
“I knew she’d go off,” he said. “I was right, wasn’t I? I’m the one on my back in the gravel. Did anybody here see me hit her? Did anybody see that?”
One of the older guys, the ones who’d laughed, said, “You shoved her, Clyde.”
He said it like he was sorry to have to.
Clyde turned on him.
“You stood there,” he said. “Every one of you stood there. Every one of you knew how it goes on the fourth night. Twenty-nine years, nobody in this room said a goddamn word, and now you’re gonna look at me like I’m the only one who knew?”
Virginia set the green ledgers on the table, one at a time, four of them. She didn’t open them.
Clyde looked at them. He knew what they were. Everybody in Wakefield knew Virginia’s ledgers.
“You’ve been keeping score,” he said to her.
“I’ve been keeping the log, Clyde.”
He went red again, from the neck up, the same as on the lot.
Then it drained, the same as on the lot.
He looked past me to the back row.
“Laverne,” he said. “Look at you. In the shirt.”
My mother didn’t move.
“Tell your girl,” he said. “Go on. Tell her how it was. You sat in my truck afterward and cried, and you said you were sorry for wasting my time. Every one of them said that. I sent them home before they got somebody killed, and every one of them thanked me for it.”
The window unit dripped into the can.
“I didn’t thank you, Clyde,” my mother said.
That was all she said. She said it the way she counts falls on Sundays.
Clyde opened his mouth to answer, and the door at the side of the room opened first.
Aleksandra came in with her little boy on her hip. He was maybe two and asleep, with his face in her neck.
She didn’t sit down. She walked to the front table and set her phone down in front of Max, face up.
“I got it,” she said. “All of it. I was holding it the whole time.”
She looked at Clyde, which I hadn’t seen her do once in eleven weeks.
“Before she stepped out, he leaned over to you,” she said to Max. “He said, Watch this one. You said, Not again, Clyde. It’s on there.”
Max looked down at the phone and didn’t touch it.
The whole room was looking at Max now.
“You told me you’d handle it,” Clyde said to him. “You drove the last one home. You’ve always handled it.”
Max put both hands flat on the table.
“I deleted mine,” he said. He said it to the room, not to Clyde. “Thursday night. In the lot. I deleted it because my boy’s on your list.”
His face looked like somebody else’s.
“Call the vote,” Clyde said. “Max. Call the goddamn vote.”
Max called it.
Three hands went up for removal. The two older guys who’d laughed, and a man from the north end who’d been on the company since the seventies and voted with Clyde on everything, even the nozzle.
Nineteen went up against.
I didn’t put my hand up for either. Probies don’t vote.
Virginia wrote the numbers down.
Then Max stood. His chair scraped.
“I move we suspend the chief pending the county’s review,” he said. “And send them Virginia’s ledgers. All of them.”
“Second,” Virginia said, without looking up from her pen.
Clyde didn’t wait for that count.
He stood and took his white helmet down off the hook. He held it a second, like he was going to say something with it in his hands.
“She threw an officer,” he said to the room. “You think the county’s gonna care what time I typed something? She threw an officer. She’s done either way.”
Then he went out through the bay, past the engine, and the door came down behind him.
March
It turned out he was half right.
The county cleared me at the hearing in September.
They had Virginia’s printouts and Aleksandra’s video, and Clyde had a lawyer from two towns over who didn’t seem to want to be there.
But I’d thrown a man in the middle of a training night, and the county has a rule about that too. My Fire I practicals didn’t count.
I had to take the class again, Monday and Wednesday nights, January through March. Eleven more weeks.
Clyde resigned in October, before the county got to him.
Max ran for chief in January because nobody else would, and won it eighteen to four. His boy didn’t get the paid job. Max didn’t talk about that, and nobody asked.
The man with the patty melt still says “Heard you went after Clyde” some Saturdays. Now he says it to whoever’s at the next stool.
My mother teaches on Sundays. She put the 1998 shirt back in the closet. She didn’t throw it out.
The first Thursday in March was thirty-eight degrees at a quarter to seven, and the gravel behind the station had frozen in ridges.
Fourteen of us stood in the line by the bay doors.
My boots were on their second set of laces. The pager was on my belt, clipped on that Monday, after Max signed the first line of my sheet at the front table with Virginia’s pen.
It was Aleksandra’s fourth Thursday. Her second try at it, like mine.
“Gallegos,” Max said. He said it right. “Front. You and Aleksandra.”
We stepped out.
He had us run the hose drill and the ladder, and then a dummy drag across the bay that weighs a hundred and eighty-five pounds.
Aleksandra got it to the line on her second pull and stood there blowing like a horse.
After, when the others went in for coffee, she asked me to show her the fall.
So I got down in the gravel.
It was cold through my pants, and it bit into my palms the way it had in July. I showed her how to tuck her chin, and how to slap down flat with her whole arm so the gravel takes it instead of you.
She went down wrong the first time. Her helmet rolled away toward the pop machine.
She got up with gravel on her cheek, and she didn’t wipe it off.
“Again,” I said.
If you know somebody who stood in a line like that and kept their eyes on the flagpole, this one is for them.
For more small-town drama and people proving they’re tougher than they look, read the story of a sign that made a motorcycle-loving sister-in-law laugh and Alvin’s summer of guarding the tomato ladder. For a more tender tale, there’s the neighbor who babysat a boy beneath a crabapple tree.
