Rita heard the front door swing open, and Mitch thudded in wearing his heavy boots. He stopped in the kitchen doorway and leaned against the jamb. His hair and uniform were a crumpled mess. “Hi,” he said. “Something smells good.”
“How does lasagna sound?” Rita said.
“Sounds real good. We saved a couple kids today.”
Rita wiped her hands on a thin dishtowel and turned directly towards him. The circles under his eyes were very dark after the long shift, but his eyes still danced. “Yeah?”
He smiled, his teeth bright. He had missed a dark smear of soot near his ear.
Mitch almost never talked about work. There were bad days – when an apartment building burned to the ground, or a civilian got burned up, or a firefighter was injured (or worse) – and the last thing in the world he wanted to do was come home and relive the horrible events he sometimes had to experience.
When they were first married, she had tried to get him to talk. He would slog home, slump into his overstuffed armchair, and for fifteen minutes he would drink beer and stare at the television. “Nothing,” he would snap, “nothing happened.”
At first she was hurt by his reticence, but she slowly realized it was probably better this way. He needed home to be a haven, a place where the bad things never intruded. Now, six years later, he still dropped in front of the TV after his shift, although he didn’t drink beer any more. Mitch and Andrew Spears got together and agreed to give up alcohol, so they would be more alert for their jobs.
And Rita was a firefighter’s wife. Julie Spears, Andrew’s wife, told Rita once that wives had a job too, an important support role. Mitch and Rita were newlyweds at the time, invited over for a barbecue. The women were inside cutting up vegetables for hamburgers. Julie’s eyes were pink from slicing an onion. “If it wasn’t for us,” Julie said as she wiped a tear with the back of her hand, “they wouldn’t be able to go out and do their jobs day after day. They couldn’t stand it.”
Eventually, what Julie said began to make sense. So Rita stopped complaining. When Mitch wasn’t brooding, she took it upon herself to make their time together fun and happy.
Her most successful technique was letting him see her naked. Once, before they were married, as she climbed out of the tub, he was standing there watching. “Baby, I
love
your butt!” After that, whenever she got the chance, she made sure he caught a glimpse of her naked backside. Waking up in the morning. In the shower. Putting on makeup. She spent a lot of hours on the Stair Master keeping her butt toned and fit.
It was the part she played to keep the city safe from fire.
But none of that kept her from worrying.
The worst days were the ones when someone was seriously injured or killed. The sickening news speeded along the phone lines among the wives and girlfriends. “Somebody from the 164th died, have you heard who?” “I heard it was the 112th. Have you heard from Mitch? If he calls, ask him if Andrew is OK.” And then the long, sleepless night, waiting for someone to find out what really happened, watching the TV news, desperately hoping to see Mitch’s image captured by a news camera.
And then, when he finally came home, the enormous relief. And then Mitch’s maddening silence.
But Mitch was bursting to talk today, a mood Rita had not seen in years. “So what happened?” she asked eagerly.
“We got to this old house and it was already almost fully involved, smoke everywhere, big flames coming out under the eaves. A teenage girl was running around crying and screaming. She said her brother is still inside. Cap was trying to get her to explain where exactly they were, but she was hysterical, and we couldn’t get anything out of her.
“The other crew was getting ready to get up on the roof, and I was waiting to be second on the water line, but they were having trouble with the hydrant connection. Cap told me I needed to get in there and see if I could find the boy.
