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The alarm stopped blaring as suddenly as it had started. Another false alarm. There had already been three since school started. Someone had probably pulled it again and was standing out here, just as cold and miserable as everyone else but now holding a secret, too.
For the next few minutes, they all stood shivering and waiting for the bell that would signal their permission to return to the building. Dinah was so focused on the school entrance as she waited for the firefighters to exit through it that she didn’t notice the other firefighter who approached from behind her and touched her sweater-clad arm.
“Hey there, Miss Fraser.”
She didn’t need to see his face to know who was there. His familiar voice felt like a warm caress sliding up her neck, and her arm tingled where he’d touched it. The sensation surprised her because she’d thought her skin was too numb to feel anything.
Still, when she turned to face him, she did her best to appear surprised. Already a large man, Alex appeared massive wearing bunker pants and a cumbersome tan jacket with reflective bands on its chest, bottom edge and sleeves. He must have left his helmet in the truck.
“Oh, Mr. Donovan, it’s good to see you again.” She cleared her throat. “I mean…well, the circumstances aren’t the best, but—”
“I know what you mean.”
She smiled, grateful he’d saved her from whatever inane thing she would have said if she’d had time to come up with one. “Sorry about the false alarm.”
“Yeah, me, too.”
“We’ve had a few lately.”
His nod and his frown combined. “It’s unfortunate and not just because it’s illegal to trigger a false alarm. If you have a lot of false alarms, people begin to not take them seriously.”
It was Dinah’s turn to frown. She’d worried about that exact thing. “You don’t mean…”
He shook his head as he must have picked up on her meaning. “No, the fire department responds every time as though it’s a real emergency. Even to those locations where there’s a bad track record.”
Dinah grimaced. Her school certainly had one of those.
But instead of criticizing as he had every right to, Alex waved away the situation as water under the bridge.
“What can you do?” he said with a sigh as he scanned the rows of students. “Since I was here anyway, I thought I would come over and say hello to my best girl.”
Dinah swallowed hard, and her neck tingled before she had the chance to really process what he’d said. Best girl? Did guys in the New Millennium still use an old term like that? Maybe they did when they were referring to a child who looked up to them with adoration in her huge, light brown eyes.
Chelsea was doing just that when Dinah caught the tiny blonde’s approach in her side vision. The child’s cap of straight, chin-length hair blew every which way, and her long-sleeved T-shirt probably wasn’t keeping her warm, but Chelsea still grinned like a child on Christmas morning as she stared at her hero.
Best girl. Of course. It humiliated Dinah to admit that, just for a second, she’d wished Alex had been talking about her. Who could blame the little girl for some hero adoration over Alex when Dinah had a mild case of that herself, and she was nowhere near a child.
“Hi, Uncle Alex,” Chelsea said almost shyly as she stepped closer to him.
“Get over here, you goofy kid.” Alex bent at the waist and held his hands wide.
That wouldn’t have been Dinah’s choice for what to say to a child, but the petite nine-year-old grinned and ran into his arms. So much for what she knew.
“Did you come here to put out the fire?” Chelsea asked him when she pulled back.
“There’s no fire. It’s a false alarm.”
“Oh.” The child stared back at the building and nodded as if just realizing that it wouldn’t be burning to the ground today.
“But you should always react to an alarm as if there could be a real fire,” he reminded her.
“Okay.”
Dinah couldn’t help but smile at that. Alex was so worried about being an inadequate guardian, and already Chelsea accepted his direction without question. Sometimes she would have given anything to have that kind of authority in the classroom.
“What are you smiling about?”
Alex lifted an eyebrow when Dinah turned after hearing his question. His bare hands must have been cold because he stuffed them in the pockets of his jacket.
When he might have looked away, he continued to watch her. His intelligent eyes seemed to see right through her, to recognize the loneliness in her that she’d always tried to hide. She wasn’t used to feeling this exposed, and yet for the life of her, she couldn’t look away.
If not for the bell that rang, signaling the all clear and making her leap back at least four inches, she might have gone right on staring back at him. Alex seemed to look away reluctantly, as well.
As if they both remembered where they were at the same time, Alex and Dinah glanced down at Chelsea. The two of them hadn’t been the only ones staring the last few minutes, and the child’s knowing smile hinted at just what she’d seen. Chelsea looked back and forth between them, her smile widening. If Alex really had been able to look into Dinah’s eyes and sense her thoughts, maybe Chelsea shared that family trait.
Dinah cleared her throat and turned to the rest of the class. “Okay, everyone. It’s time to go back inside. Please keep quiet and stay in line until we reach the classroom.”
“Well, I’d better get back to the truck. See you tonight, kiddo.” Alex gave Chelsea one last hug.
“Good seeing you, Mr. Donovan.”
Dinah started forward, putting on an air of nonchalance that she hoped Alex would buy. She couldn’t remember ever being around a man who put her nerve endings on alert the way he did. Her palms were so damp that she would be embarrassed if one of her students took her hand on the way inside the building. Despite her best resistance, she glanced over her shoulder at Alex, hoping he wouldn’t catch her.
He did, and he smiled and waved. “Goodbye, Miss Fraser. Tell Reverend Fraser I said hello.”
Dinah swallowed. If he knew about her family, why had he pretended not to the other day? But she had no time to process the information, not when she had twenty-four students behind her, who all needed to return to their classroom. Their chatter followed her inside the building and down the hall, but she didn’t take time to correct them.
She had a job to do, had a class full of third-graders relying on her to restore order and to make them feel safe at school, and she wouldn’t let anything, even her own hormones, get in the way of her doing it.
Soon, she’d taken her place behind her desk, and the students were back at their own grouped desks working on the illustrations for their personal narratives as they had been before the alarm. Dinah had just opened her copy of The Secret Garden again, when Chelsea raised her hand. Dinah would have been annoyed with the interruption, but at least the child was participating in class again.
“Yes, Chelsea? Do you need help with something?”
Chelsea nodded, as if she had a serious matter to discuss. Dinah straightened in her chair. She wasn’t sure what she would say if Chelsea said she was worried her father would die in the war or that her mother might not survive her cancer treatment. Should she encourage her to talk, even if it wasn’t the most appropriate time? Dinah braced her hands on the edge of her desk and waited.
“Miss Fraser, is Uncle Alex your boyfriend?”
“Hey, Brandon,” Alex called out as soon as the door to his spare bedroom opened. Heavy footfalls could be heard in the hall.
The lean teenager appeared with a baseball cap backward over his sandy-brown mop of surfer-dude hair, his perpetual slouch and frown firmly in place. He answered with a grunt, his usual greeting. Alex was probably supposed to feel privileged that he’d responded at all. Whoever thought mood swings were exclusive to teenage girls hadn’t met any teenage boys.
“Did you get your homework done?”
Brandon grunted again. Who had kidnapped that sweet little boy he’d known and left this crabby teenager instead? It wasn’t a fair trade as far as Alex was concerned.
“Was that a yes?” Alex had considered working out a communication system with the boy—one grunt for yes and two for no. Maybe they could add eye blinking and finger snapping to increase their vocabulary.
“Yeah,” Brandon said.
For the last hour, Alex had lain sprawled on his living room floor working with Chelsea on an impossible puzzle of Colorado’s Pike’s Peak. He’d hoped Brandon might join in, too, but he was glad now he hadn’t been holding his breath waiting for it. The boy barely paused by the closet for a jacket before heading to the front door.
Alex sat up first and then stood to face the boy. “Where are you going?” He’d hoped to keep the annoyance out of his voice but hadn’t quite managed it.
There was only so long that they could all walk around on eggshells, trying not to set off Brandon before Alex had the urge to stomp the shells to dust. Alex figured he’d been plenty patient already, not insisting that Brandon get a haircut and not blowing a gasket over the hat the boy insisted on wearing in the house.
The hot look that appeared in Brandon’s deep brown eyes and the tightness of his jaw suggested he didn’t think Alex had a right to ask questions, but the boy mumbled an answer anyway. “To Jake’s.”
“Who is that, where does he live, and what are you going to do there?”
Ah man, when exactly did you turn into your parents? Was it the moment he’d agreed to bring his cousin’s two children into his home, or was it a nanosecond after that ill-conceived decision? Either way, he now had everything in common with his parents, except for his dad’s pocket protector and his mom’s ode-to-the-fifties haircut, and the two were probably laughing down from Heaven right now.
Brandon must have conveniently forgotten the first two of the three questions because he only answered, “A bunch of us are just going to hang out.”
Alex might be new to this parenting business, but did Brandon really think he’d been born the day he accepted guardianship? He’d even survived his teens, somehow, and he knew most of the tricks. “A bunch of us” was probably just code for kids with names like Spike and Rex or, worse yet, Brittney and Nicole. And “hanging out” was something teens did when they didn’t have anything better to do than to pack at somebody’s house and get into trouble.
He didn’t know if real parents had moments of panic where they were certain that a wrong decision could mean disaster for their kids, but Alex understood he was at a crossroads. One wrong move and…oh, he didn’t want to think about what could happen.
“I guess I’ll see you later then,” Brandon said with hope in his voice.
“Nah,” Alex said, already shaking his head. “I don’t think so.” He paused, searching madly for a good reason, and then his gaze landed on the wall clock.
It was already eight o’clock. “I don’t think hanging out is a good idea, especially on a school night.”
Brandon stared at him as if he’d suddenly grown antlers or something. “Are you kidding?”
Alex shrugged. “Not much of a comedian.”
“I live in a prison.”
“The food’s probably better in a real one,” Alex shot back, trying to lighten the tense situation, but Brandon was already out of earshot.
The boy’s stomping would have drowned out any comment he’d made, anyway. Once Brandon reached his room, he rushed in and slammed the door behind him. Soon the house vibrated with the bass sounds of the teen’s awful music, but at least he was inside and safe.
Alex released the breath he wasn’t aware he’d been holding. He’d dodged a bullet, and he would be foolish to believe it would be the last one Brandon would lob at him. Chelsea wasn’t the only one taking her mother’s illness hard. Brandon was acting out, and Alex didn’t know how to handle him or to help him.
He felt as powerless as he always did when he looked at the ruins of a fire his station had reached too late. Who knew parenting could be so hard? He’d always imagined children as a part of his future, but maybe this was a signal that he wasn’t cut out for the job.
The whole nasty scene had taken place with Chelsea lying on the floor and fitting more pieces of the puzzle than Alex had all night. Now the third-grader popped up and moved to sit cross-legged.
“Brandon’s mad,” she pointed out needlessly.
“I gathered that.”
She twirled her fingers through a pile of white pieces destined to find a home somewhere in the puzzle’s snow-capped mountains. “He just misses Mom and Dad.”
Alex swallowed. He’d been waiting for this, had prepared himself for when she would talk about her feelings, but Chelsea chose to come to him now, when his temporary parenting well was all but bone-dry. Still, he had to step up. He could handle a four-alarm fire, and he could do this.
“You probably miss them, too.”
Chelsea’s tiny right shoulder lifted and dropped. “I hope they’re okay.”
“Yeah, me, too, kiddo.” He lowered himself to the floor and painfully bent into a pretzel seating position to face her. “I’m sure they will be. God’s watching out for them, you know.”
“I know. I pray for them at bedtime.”
Alex hoped the awe didn’t show in his expression. What he wouldn’t have given to have that kind of childlike faith. She just listed her petitions to God and waited on Him to do the rest. For Chelsea’s sake, Alex hoped she received the answers she wanted because he’d been around long enough to understand now that God sometimes said “no.”
“That’s good to pray for them.” He would have known that she did if he would have remembered to share nighttime prayers with Chelsea, but he could worry about his failures later. This was about her. “It’s okay to be scared, too.”
“I think Brandon’s scared.”
Oh, so this was how they were going to play it. A little projection would probably make it easier for her to open up to him. “I’m sure he is.”
“He wonders if Dad is afraid at night in the desert. He wants to know if the hospital people remember to put socks on Mom’s feet so she doesn’t get cold.”
A knot formed in Alex’s throat so suddenly that he was shocked by the tide of emotion. He cleared his throat to tuck the uncomfortable feelings back under a blanket of proper control. “But Brandon knows that your dad has his friends with him in the desert, right? And he has to know that the doctors and nurses are giving your mom really great care.”
She nodded, not looking convinced of either of his assertions. “Brandon probably just needs to spend more time with friends so he can feel better.”
Alex’s gaze narrowed. He’d assumed that Chelsea was opening up about her feelings. But was this really a sibling attempt to increase Brandon’s chances of hanging out? Wow, he’d been played, and he hadn’t even realized it.
“Friends, huh?” Frowning, he ruffled her hair. “I’m not letting him—or you for that matter—hang out on a school night, and that’s all there is to it.”
Despite the tough front he was trying to portray, Alex couldn’t help blowing out a breath in frustration. “I don’t even know this Jake or any of the rest of his friends,” he said more to himself than her.
“He should make some friends at church.”
Alex opened his mouth to shoot down whatever argument she had next, but he closed it when Chelsea’s words sank in. It wasn’t a bad idea.
“At church?” He’d reached a new low if he was seeking parenting advice from a nine-year-old, but at least one of them had an idea.
“You know, like a youth group.”
“I don’t think they have one of those at my church.”
“What about at another church?”
Alex thought about it for a few seconds and then frowned. The only local church he knew of that boasted a large, active youth group was Chestnut Grove Community Church, known for its Fall Carnival. That this just happened to be Reverend Fraser’s church and where his daughter attended was just a coincidence. It had to be.
“I do know of one at the Chestnut Grove church.”
“Let’s go there.” Chelsea had a strange look in her eyes, but it was probably just enthusiasm.
“Maybe we can visit there sometime soon. Do you think Brandon will go for it?”
“Maybe.” Chelsea nodded as if the matter was settled and then flipped back on her belly to return to their puzzle pieces. Immediately she found a pair that fit together and held them up to show him.
“Good job.” Alex stretched out next to her on the deep pile carpeting, planting his elbows on the floor and resting his chin in his hands.
