Copyright 2002 by Elizabeth Delayne
“Why did they send the likes of you down here?”
Rick Jones squared off with Molly’s mother, the little gray headed, half Italian woman. Her restaurant usually rated well under the fire codes, so he hoped the inspection would go quickly. The woman was formidable, even at her five-foot height. It was her eyes, he thought, that sized him up quickly and made him feel five inches tall.
“No one sent me, Mrs. Green and you know it. It’s my job to perform the fire inspections,” he lifted his hands in surrender, one with a clipboard, one with a pen, “so if you’ll just let me do my job—”
“You can just walk right on out of here and come back some other time.”
“The inspection’s past do as it is.”
“That ain’t no fault of mine.”
No—but only because she’d sent him on his way; four times in the past month. He sighed. There had been a time when she would gently pat or pinch his cheek with her small hand—now, he was almost afraid if he got to close she would strike him. “Look, I didn’t mean to hurt Molly.”
“You made your choice, Mr. Jones. You chose not to think of my daughter.”
I did think of her, he thought. I thought of her too much.
“Mother,” Molly’s quiet plea had her mother turning around looking guilty and ashamed. Rick lifted his gaze as well. She was standing at the bottom of the stairs that led to the second floor apartments above the diner.
Molly looked, he thought, polished and beautiful, graceful. Her hair was down, framing her face, her dark eyes cold.
She slipped her purse strap over her shoulder. “Let Rick do the inspection. It’s his job. I’m on my way out as it is.”
She spared him a glance as she stepped by, “Excuse me,” was all she said.
“Go ahead and do your inspection now, Mr. Jones. It hardly matters.”
Rick glanced at her mother, and thought of Molly, his lips pressed into a firm line, “I’ll be right back.”
He followed her out of the restaurant and jogged down the block to catch up with her. He reach out, stopped her brisk pace with a simple hand to her arm. “Molly,” was all he said. He felt the flash of fire, of shaking heat that had nearly defeated him. He searched her eyes with his own, feeling out of place, lost in a smoke screen.
“Go away Rick,” she muttered, glancing at him briefly before focusing her eyes on a sign across the street.
“I’m sorry.”
“Are you?” she looked at him, or through him, he thought. “You know what? So am I. But I think we’re sorry for different things.”
She started to walk, her pace brisk, “I’m sorry for wasting two years waiting for you to give me some kind of commitment. I’m sorry for every time I sat alone, waiting for you to call, wondering if you were all right, believing that I was caring for you by accepting your job and loving you for it. I’m sorry for believing in what we had together.”
He stopped her again, hands grabbing out to hold on to her arms. “I believed.”
She shook her head, “No you didn’t.”
His pager shrilled and startled them both. He slipped it from his belt, checked it. His frown deepened. “I’ve got to go,” he looked at her, searched her eyes. “Molly, I need to talk to you. I just need to talk to you.”
She looked at him, looked into him, he thought, before she took a deep breath and looked away. “No.”
“Molly, please—”
She turned back, hands on her hips as she eyed him coolly. “Why?”
“There are things I need to say.”
“You had two years of relationship time to say them. I don’t want to see you anymore.”
“I didn’t know how to say them,” he said and watched as she started to turn away, deathly afraid she would call the cops on him for harassment or some other trumped up charge before it was all over with. “I was afraid to say it then.”
“I don’t want to say yes to you,” she said, focusing on something in the distance. She swallowed, hard. “But it seems I—I don’t know what to say, Rick. Give me a call. Maybe later ....”
He nodded, glanced in surprise as she reached for him as he started to turn away. He looked at her.
“Stay safe,” she whispered. He nodded, pivoted and jogged down the street as his pager sounded again.
* * * * *
“Took you a long time to run to the post office.”
“I needed to think.”
“Thinking about that boy again.”
“Mother . . . let it go. The longer you do that the longer it’s going to hurt for me.”
“Why did he follow you?”
“Because he hurt himself,” Molly said simply. “I don’t really know what’s going on in his head. I thought I did, but . . . .”
She’d never expected him to break up with her. They’d been together since she’d moved back into town. He had moved in only a few months before that, taking the job as fire Marshall. She’d worried about him when she knew he was at fires. She’d cared for him.
She still loved him.
Turning away from her mother, because she understood the look in her eyes, Molly headed upstairs to the apartment above the restaurant. When she was alone, and only then, she sat down in her father’s chair thought about crying again.
She didn’t want to. She didn’t want to shed another tear over Rick Jones.
She curled her legs underneath her, and watched the sunlight glimmer on a brass frame that held a picture of her father. He’d been a wonderful, loving father, a godly man ... as she’d thought, wished maybe, that Rick would be.
Why did he want to come around again? Why did she want him to?
How dare he look at her with that intensity--that passion, that fire--that had weakened her knees.
She sat for several long minutes, listening to the grandfather clock tick away, as the sun slowly slipped toward night.
When the phone rang, she reached for it, half hoping it was Rick, off shift, needing to pick up the conversation, half hoping it wasn’t.
“Molly, it’s Debbie.”
Debbie was a dispatcher at the 911 center. Molly sat up, uncurled her legs from underneath. They hit the floor.
“We don’t know what happened. They’re taking two firemen to the hospital. They don’t know if he’s going to make it. I don’t know if it’s—”
“Rick?”
“I don’t know. He was one of the two they took.”
“I’m on my way,” she said and tossed the phone into the chair. She prayed in motion, barely realizing when she broke into a run.
* * * * *
Rick sat in the waiting room, his hands buried in his hair. He didn’t choose to feel—he didn’t choose to think. He couldn’t pray.
When Molly dropped down in front of him, he spared her a glance, and then closed his eyes.
“Are you okay?”
Her voice sounded dry, deep and aged. He opened his eyes to look at her and nodded.
“They don’t think he’s going to make it.” He thought of Joe, of Joe’s wife and two daughters. He was a man of faith.
“Can you tell me what happened?” she asked and slipped his hand from his hair to sooth it with both of her own.
He looked at the ceiling, trying to process his thoughts, then shook his head. “We went in. The roof caved in. Everything moved so fast and so quickly. They brought me here. I don’t need to be here.”
“The fire’s contained, nearly out,” Molly assured him as someone else had.
“Molly—” he reached out and touched her cheek with his hand. She was so beautiful, he thought again. Her eyes weren’t the hard, edgy ones that assessed him as her mother’s had. They were calming. “I miss you.”
“Rick,” she sighed and moved from her kneeling position on the floor to the seat beside him. “I can’t promise I’ll be here tomorrow to be with you. I don’t want to be with you tomorrow right now. But I want to be with you right now.”
“I messed up,” he muttered and leaned over to rest his forehead on her shoulder, much like a tired child would do to a mother. “I just messed up.”
Molly ran a hand over his head and felt his sigh.
“It was just easier to push what I felt for you aside instead of dealing with the fact that you’re it for me. It was a scary thought.”
“Scared you?”
“Because you just loved me. You loved me so easily. You were like a fire, burning out of control.”
“You’re too much a fireman,” she said softly. Molly ran a hand over his head and sighed on her own, “Shh. We’ll think of it later.”
* * * * *
Rick checked his tie in the glass window of the restaurant and took a deep breath. When he stepped in, the bells tinkling over him, Molly’s mother stood in the way.
“What are you doing here?” she asked, tossing down her towel much as a wrestler would, tagged in for the fight. “You got my girl upset last time you came around.”
“I seem to do that,” he said calmly. “But I’m aiming to fix things.”
“Seemed you fixed them the first time, by up an leaving.”
“Mrs. Green, your daughter is one of the most generous, beautiful women I know. I messed things up. I’m not afraid of admitted that, or of taking the time to prove to her and to you that I want to make it better.”
“Nothing’s ever good, if you expect it be easy.”
“Dad used to say that.”
Rick turned and looked up at Molly as she came down the stairs. She wasn’t smiling; not his Molly smile, but her eyes were calm and open once again.
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