Wildfire Smokejumper Trilogy

Chapter 3-3

Macy’s date was dead and done.

She was just saying goodbye and thanking Brett for being decent about the whole thing; her fiancé—prior to the broken nose and missing teeth—had been a very popular man in Larch Creek. It was on the verge of becoming awkward when there was a shriek of delight that had both her and Brett stumbling out of their booth to look.

Over at the table where Dad had been sitting with his writing friends—and where she’d expected to finish off this evening—a towering figure was hugging Eva Harada. Even standing on her chair, the woman was shorter than he was. There was no question who it might be. Tim Harada had passed five feet by third grade and six feet before high school. He’d made the Larch Creek Snow Angels unbeatable in basketball four years running.

Tim and her big brother Stephen had been an unstoppable forward force, both on and off the court. The two of them had always swept the field whether the game was basketball, video, or dating.

Macy was not going to think about Tim. When Stephen had died in Afghanistan, Tim had made it home for the funeral, but stopped coming home after that. It had hurt. She’d lost her big brother twice, in some ways.

While she’d never thought of Tim as her big brother, not even a little, it was clear that was how he’d always seen his role in her life. He’d zealously guarded the outspoken girl who was always in trouble with someone about something. Tim had fished her out of even more scraps and scrape-ups than Stephen had. He was the one who had dragged her into his mom’s Kung Fu class, “If you’re going to be such a pain in the butt, you better learn how to survive it.” The guy couldn’t even swear decently, but he’d always been on her side.

It wasn’t until he was gone that she’d missed him. Missed him like a hole had been chopped in her heart.

On his last couple visits, she’d been off at college in Juneau and then flight school in Anchorage. She would come home and find that everyone was talking about Tim-this and Tim-that. His smokejumping had taken on mythic proportions. Actually, Mount Hood Aviation’s firefighting reputation had even reached up here and being on the lead stick meant that mythic might be about right.

It had been a long time since he’d been home and far longer since she’d seen him.

Well, she didn’t need him back now.

She hooked her arm through Brett’s elbow.

“If you want to walk me home, that would be nice. Just don’t think it means anything, Brett.”

“Sure, Mace.”

She liked that he fell back to her old nickname. It was comfortable, an old childhood nickname that rarely surfaced any more. And, she realized with chagrin, it was one that Tim Harada had tagged her with after she’d chased him around the yard swinging a two-by-four. She’d been six and he ten, and he’d teased her so far past tolerance that he would have soundly deserved it if she had caught him.

“Like a rabid knight with a mace,” he’d told Stephen that night over dinner. She’d at least had the satisfaction of planting a hard kick to his shin under the table.

She turned her attention back to Brett, “Didn’t Linda Lee always have a soft spot for you? Seems to me she did. She just divorced that guy from Talkeetna and is coming back to Larch Creek. I bet she could use a friendly shoulder when she comes in next week.”

She half listened to Brett’s surprised reply of “Really? She did?” as they stepped out through the door. Men just didn’t have a clue.

The other half of her attention was noticing that Tim had sat right down at the table and was welcomed as if he’d never been away.

Tim had always fit in.

Well, she didn’t need to be hurt by him. She knew his pattern from the stories. Hit town for a few days, and then bail. Men so didn’t have a clue.

She gave Brett her full attention as they headed down the steps and strolled together under the long summer sunset that lasted past midnight this time of year.