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Bill was late off shift, but Roe and the new kid were later. Their ambulance screeched into the depot thirty-five minutes after they were supposed to be done, when Bill was just about to head out to the bar. The Hole In The Wall was a block and a half from the depot, and as far as Bill could tell it was mostly kept alive by first responders. There were no cops there, which was just fine in Bill’s eyes, but pretty much everyone from the precinct went there after their shifts for a beer or several, paramedics, firefighters, ambulance drivers, techs, pretty much fuckin’ everyone gathered around to debrief, to talk over their day, to forget their day, or to shoot the shit with their co-workers.
Really, ‘co-workers’ was a weird term for it. Pretty much everyone had found that it could be tough to keep up with their normal friends when they spent most of their lives on twelve or twenty-four hour shifts, so as it turned out, Bill was closer to everyone at the depot than he was to anyone else he knew, except for maybe his ma. Even then it was cutting it fine, because she didn’t like to know too much about his job. It scared her, she said, although when she mentioned that, he liked to lift up the leg of his pants to mid-calf and tap the metal there and remind her that the worst had almost happened already, and he’d got through it – and why had he got through it? Because he was a Guarnere, that was why, he’d say, and then she’d smile tearily and roll her eyes at him and tell him to be careful.
He was careful, except for when he wasn’t, which was the case for all of them. Nobody got into a job like firefighting if they were precious about their own bodies. He’d never been that attached to his own, except for what it could get him, the way he’d always got girls with his smile and envious looks from guys in the gym when they saw what he could lift. He liked the scars he had now. The leg had been a shock, but he’d been more worried that he wouldn’t be able to work again than anything else. Ten months after the amputation he’d passed all the physical tests and got right back to work on the trucks. I’m better than I was before, he’d told his nephew, I’m like Iron Man, even though he’d never actually seen those movies and only really knew that the guy was half man and half machine or some shit like that. Either way, he believed it.
It had been a normal day. Frannie had been getting off shift at the same time he started, so he’d arrived early so he could take a little time talking to her, but he’d got sidetracked by the guys, and she’d wound up showing Roe’s new kid around anyway. She was that kind of person, warm and welcoming. That morning he and Joe Toye had been on scene to help cut a couple out of a car after a one-vehicle smash into a utility pole, and they’d mostly been alright – shocked, and there had been a lot of blood, but that happened with cuts to the head, even if they were shallow.
He and Johnny Martin had taken time that afternoon to install some smoke detectors in some homes down in the south of the city. One old lady had some already, but the batteries were so old they’d crusted over. She’d made them weak coffee and offered them homemade oatmeal cookies, which they had eaten sitting on her plastic-covered couch while making conversation about her small blind dog, which nosed curiously around them and drooled on Johnny’s boots. Bill had got the feeling she was lonely, the old lady but probably the dog as well, so they’d stuck around for a little longer than necessary. Johnny was good with old ladies, they always liked him and he was nice to them, although when Bill had pointed it out one time Johnny had looked uncomfortable and told him to go fuck himself.
Bill had a good feeling about the new kid, although admittedly he had a good feeling about anyone who had the same accent as him. He was a trainee, attached to Doc Roe, which meant that he’d probably learn fast. Doc was quiet, it was hard to drag him out in the evenings unless Frannie was there to persuade him, but he knew his shit. When he appeared on scene Bill knew that was one less thing to think about.
Still, the new kid – Babe, that was his name – didn’t look too happy as he hopped out of the passenger seat of the ambulance. He’d seemed like a good enough guy that morning when they’d shaken hands in the break room, but it wasn’t always easy to adjust to a job like theirs. Bill didn’t know how he’d feel spending a whole day sitting next to Eugene Roe in an ambulance either. Sure, he was a good guy, but he was also silent as hell and that could be disconcerting. Even Bill sometimes ran out of things to say when they sat next to each other at the bar, although Spina seemed to be able to talk nonstop to him, and Frannie too, although Frannie could talk to absolutely anyone. She always knew the right thing to say. Bill had seen it with his own eyes more times than he could count. Personally, he could talk but he didn’t always get it right. She was the kind of person who never screwed it up or accidentally pissed someone off without meaning to. She was the kind of person, too, who knew exactly how to soothe someone who was hurting. It wasn’t a woman thing, like his dad would probably assume, it was a her thing. She was a good person, the kind of person he was lucky to know.
Roe got out of the driver’s side more slowly, shutting the door behind himself. He looked lost in thought, although that wasn’t any different from normal. Bill had already changed into his street clothes and was about to head out, along with Toye and Johnny and Bull, and with Tab from the medics’ team too. He’d stuck his head around Winters’ office door to try to persuade him to come out too, but Winters had just shot a significant look at a stack of paperwork and sighed and said, “You and the guys have fun, Bill.”
“Hey! Doc! You comin’?” Bill hollered across the depot, and Roe made an indecisive face before shrugging a shoulder in agreement. “He’s comin’,” Bill told Toye before Roe could change his mind, and bellowed, “Babe! You promised!”
“Hell yeah, I need a damn drink,” Babe called back, and Bill laughed over at him. That was what he liked to hear. “I just gotta clean the truck,” Babe said then, looking dubious, and Roe put in, “We had a puker.”
“Damn. I’ll get your first beers,” Bill told them. It sounded like they’d need it. On the walk to the bar he texted Frannie: Headin down now. See ya soon? and a moment later he got a smiling emoji from her that he knew he stared at for a moment too long, because Toye caught him in the ribs with an elbow and laughed at him. “Fuck off,” Bill told him, and Toye snickered to himself some more, because he was an asshole.
The thing with Frannie was that it wasn’t actually a thing. When he’d started at the station, she’d had a boyfriend so he’d put it out of his mind, the sight of her dark curls pulled back off her face and her easy smile, the way she seemed to listen hard and really care about what people said to her. When she’d broken up with her boyfriend – he’d dumped her, the stupid motherfucker letting her slip through his fingers – the truth was that by then, Bill had been through a few girls, and people knew about it, and when he’d asked her if she wanted to get a drink with him, she’d smiled in a strange and complicated way and said, “Me and Wild Bill? I don’t know about that.” He couldn’t blame her, but part of him blamed his dumbass self for going home with girls at the bar and crowing about it at work with the guys the next day. He got the feeling that it wasn’t the fact he’d been with all those girls that was an issue, but that the high fives he’d accepted about it had been a problem for her. He got that. Then, just as they’d fallen right into the friend zone, he’d lost his leg. She’d been great about it, bringing him meals and taking him to rehab appointments and sitting in silence with him on the other side of his couch on the nights he hated the fucking world for what it had done to him. Being friends with her was enough, he thanked God every day that he knew her. He didn’t want to screw up one of the best things in his life by wanting more from a woman who wasn’t obligated to give it to him.
She arrived ten minutes after they did, sliding into the seat across from Bill and pressing her knee against his good one under the table. “One of these for me?” she asked, taking a glass and filling it from the pitcher of beer on the table without waiting for an answer. He could smell her perfume, sweet and fruity, and for once her dark curls were wild around her shoulders instead of scraped back into a knot on the top of her head.
“You scrub up well, Fran,” Tab said, and she tucked those curls behind an ear and fluttered her eyelashes until they were all laughing. Then she said she needed a snack and went up to the bar to order a plate of nachos.
They needed more beer too, so Bill joined her there. She turned her head to smile at him and leaned her shoulder against his as they waited for the bartender to be free. “How was your day, Wild Bill?” she asked. Sometimes when she called him that, he felt like she was making fun of him, although he didn’t think she meant it in a shitty way.
“You know what? It was pretty good,” he said. He didn’t feel like telling her about the couple they’d cut out of the car, or the call they’d had later, the scorched living room and the sobbing woman who didn’t have insurance. “We installed some smoke detectors,” he told her instead. “Get a load of this dog.” He pulled his phone out of his pocket and scrolled down to find the photos he’d taken of the old lady’s little blind dog with its pearly eyes and lolling tongue.
He’d taken the pictures specifically to show Frannie, who loved all animals. He had only ever seen her crying after fires that had killed people’s pets; he figured she’d cried at other times too, because sometimes they all needed a moment to themselves, but crying about pets in public was something they all could understand. As he’d known she would, she made a delighted squeaking noise and leaned in to coo at the screen. “Look at that face,” she said, and started telling him all about how she wanted to adopt old dogs that didn’t have anywhere else to go, she wanted a whole zoo of dogs one day, except her asshole landlord wouldn’t let her have pets and with their shifts anyway—
“Oh,” she said, as the bartender finally got to them. “A plate of nachos, please. Wait – two plates.”
“Make that three,” Bill said. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Doc come in, trailed by Babe, who looked like a sulky teenager. “And another two pitchers.” Frannie was starting to take out her wallet and he swatted gently at her hands. “Hey, hey. I’ll get this.”
“Last of the big spenders.” She let him buy it, probably because she knew it would make him happy, and also because they’d known each other so long that things like buying drinks evened out over time. Her shoulder was against his again, warm even through his shirt, and he felt very aware of her right there close to him in a way he always blocked out when they were at work.
“Two more glasses, please,” he said, and gave them to her to carry over to their table as he took the pitchers. Babe was in the seat next to him now and Bill filled a glass for him. The kid looked thirsty, and when Bill sat down he smelled the faint whiff of puke coming off him. He’d changed his clothes, so it was probably from his boots. “You smell like you did a hard day’s work,” he told Babe, whose eyes widened as he furtively dipped his chin so he could sniff his pits. “Nah, not them. Your feet. Your boots get puked on?”
“Yeah.” Babe heaved out a sigh. “I hosed ’em down but I guess the smell sticks.”
Of all the smells that could stick to you in Babe’s job, puke wasn’t the worst, but Bill didn’t tell him that. Instead he nudged him and said, “Drink up.”
Obediently Babe did so, and managed to drain half his glass in one swallow. “Oh, boy. That’s good. So where you from in Philly, huh?”
Bill told him, and as it turned out they’d grown up pretty close to each other. Babe was a couple years younger, which meant he’d probably been one of those skinny little assholes whizzing around on their bikes and getting in his damn way right after Bill had got his first car. Their mas went to the same grocery store, they’d snuck into the same movie theater, but thankfully they realised pretty fast that they’d never dated the same girl. Babe was a little vague about that, which made Bill wonder if he dated girls at all. That was fine – it wasn’t like he’d be the only guy like that at the depot. Lip, a paramedic who was one of the best they had, had started an LGBTQ-whatever club. Allies could go along to their meetings too, so Bill mostly did when he could make it. His older sister was a lesbian. It had taken their ma a while to come to terms with it, although once she’d started dating her girlfriend it had gotten a little easier. She didn’t have much of a family, and his ma loved the opportunity to mother anyone she could, so it seemed to make her happy to add someone else to her brood. Bill liked her because she could match him tequila shot for tequila shot, and because she was the only person around who could satisfy his dad when it came to talking baseball statistics.
It was good to meet someone else from the same place as him. Most people around the table were transplants to the city – Roe was from the south, Tab had moved over for college and stuck around, Johnny was from Ohio and had moved for a girl, although it hadn’t worked out for him. Winters was from Pennsylvania too, but the kind of place that seemed a million miles away from anything Bill was used to. Any time Bill had pressed him about his childhood, he’d just said something vague about farms.
“So how was your day?” Bill asked Babe, who crinkled his nose thoughtfully. “That bad, huh?”
“Nah, nah,” Babe said, and he was laughing but Bill could tell there was something forced there. “It was fine. There was nothing that threw me. Kid with an asthma attack, old lady who fell over and cracked her head on a heater. There was a guy with chest pains, but it was a panic attack. Another kid who hurt his ankle playing football, but it wasn’t broken.”
“Yeah? That ain’t so bad.”
“Yeah, it was okay.” Babe exhaled. “Universe letting me settle in slow, I guess.”
During Bill’s first ever shift, there had been an oil fire, an old guy who’d spilled burning oil over himself. The sight of it hadn’t been so bad, but the sounds he’d been making, the helpless pain in his voice, that had stuck with him for a while. There was therapy available, Winters said all the time that whenever they wanted they should go talk to someone, but back then Sobel had been in charge and his grasp on mental health shit hadn’t been so hot. Anyway, Bill didn’t see what talking to someone would accomplish. Either way he’d still have that shit ingrained on his retinas for the rest of his life. Even still, he nodded at Babe and smiled at him. “Yeah, let’s hope it goes steady for you tomorrow too. And if you ever got any issues, remember you can always talk to someone about it. You met Winters yet? He runs the place. He’ll help if you want anything, he’ll set you up with therapy or some shit like that. Or you could ask Roe.”
“Yeah.” Babe chewed the inside of his mouth for a second, and then he confessed: “He doesn’t like me.”
“Doc?” Bill glanced over at Gene. He wasn’t saying anything, which wasn’t exactly abnormal for him, but he didn’t look unhappy. He was sandwiched between Tab and Spina, who had arrived sometime when Bill wasn’t looking, and smiling a little as they talked over him. “Nah. Doc likes everyone.”
“Fuckin’ great,” Babe muttered. “I guess I’m the exception.”
Bill frowned at him. “How’d you piss off Doc?” It took some doing. Roe was quiet to the point of being weird about it sometimes. He didn’t often come for a beer after his shift was over, and no one knew much about his life outside work, but Bill had only seen him angry a couple times. Once when some EMT from another crew had screwed up a basic procedural thing: Roe had been on shift with Luz and he’d still been tight-lipped when they got back to the depot, slamming the ambulance doors with force before stalking through to the changing rooms. Luz had followed behind, making a throat-slashing motion so no one talked to Doc, and afterwards, when Roe had left and everyone else was gathered around Luz, he’d told them that they’d attended the scene of a traffic accident. There had been some teenager sprawled out on the ground with a blanket over his face, and two EMTs standing off to the side talking to some bystanders. When Roe had pulled the blanket off the kid’s face, he’d realised that the other EMTs had screwed up, that the kid wasn’t dead like they’d declared, but that he urgently needed his airway clearing so he could breathe properly. Once the kid had been packed off to hospital in another ambulance, Luz said, Roe had lost his shit with the other EMTs. “He had a fuckin’ point,” Luz said, matter-of-fact, “they screwed up. Kid could have been brain damaged if Gene hadn’t taken a look at him and he’d been deprived of oxygen much longer. But I’ve never seen him yell like that before. Called them incompetent fuckin’ assholes.”
“Sounds like that’s exactly what they are,” Lieb had said, scowling, and Bill had agreed, still agreed as a matter of fact, but even then he hadn’t totally been able to imagine Doc losing his shit at anyone, or even being annoyed past a faint frown.
Babe ate a handful of nachos without chewing as many times as he probably should have. “Christ, I don’t know what I did. Made too many jokes. Talked too fucking much. I always talk too much.”
“I would have thought you and him would make a great team, then,” Bill said. “You talk too much, he don’t talk at all. Perfect.”
Babe cracked a half-smile at that. “Yeah. Maybe. I don’t know. I still got another fourteen shifts with him, so maybe by the end of it, I’ll prove that I’m not some dumbass. Or that I’m not so much of a dumbass that it interferes with my work.”
“Yeah, we’re all dumbasses here,” Bill said, fake-serious, and across the table Frannie broke off from a conversation she’d been having with Bull to say, “Speak for yourself, Bill Guarnere!”
“We’re all dumbasses here except Frannie,” Bill amended hastily, and she laughed across at him. Her dark eyes looked like they were full of stars from the little lights glittering on the ceiling and she had that hazy look on her face that she always got when she’d had a couple drinks but wasn’t drunk yet. She turned back to Bull then, and Bill sighed a little before looking back at Babe. “Roe’s a good guy. You seem all right too—”
“Gee, thanks,” Babe said.
“Shut up. Nah, you’re a good kid. You’ll get on fine at work – and sometimes you just gotta say, fuck it, because personalities, they don’t always gel, you know what I mean?” Bill said. “You know how many fuckin’ times people have gone to Winters asking not to be on shift with someone or on the same vehicle as them? But you gotta just suck it up for work even if you don’t get along. And you’re gonna get the best training from Roe, so…” He shrugged.
“Yeah, I know. I’m lucky. I’m just gonna listen to him and learn,” Babe said. He was looking past Bill at Doc, who was talking to Spina now and running the tip of his index finger around the rim of his glass. “I just wish,” Babe began, frowning hard, and Bill saw the words, I just wish he’d like me, on Babe’s face, as transparent as anything. Then Babe cleared his throat and finished the rest of his beer and visibly got his shit together, before plastering a smile on his face. “What about you and Frannie? How long have you guys been together?”
“What?” Bill’s stomach did something fucked up. “We ain’t together. We’re friends, that’s all.”
“Really?” Babe looked over at Frannie and then back at Bill. “Why?”
Bill opened his mouth, about to reel some shit off about how guys and girls could easily be friends, about how he and Frannie would never dream of going there, but it all felt fake. Instead he said, “Because she’s too damn good for me, that’s why,” with a smile, so that Babe would get that he wasn’t joking, but that he was okay with it.
“Well, that’s a shame,” Babe said, and Bill had to jab an elbow into his side so he’d shut the fuck up, because Frannie had started to frown a little even as she talked to Bull, like she could hear what they were saying. Thankfully Babe paid attention and shut his damn mouth, and Bill asked him a few more questions – why he’d wanted to be an EMT (“because I’d rather slit my own damn wrists than sit behind a desk all day”), if he wanted to be a full paramedic one day (“Jesus Christ, it’s a little early to know that”), if there was anyone else in his family that did anything to do with medicine (“Nah, every time we were sick my ma made us walk it off, even when I broke my leg”).
Then he felt like it was time for a smoke, so he left Babe in Tab’s capable hands and went outside. It was a cool night, no wind, and he wondered how the night shift was doing. There were always less calls then, but they seemed to be more serious. There were less cars on the road, so when a crash happened it always seemed to be for a really shitty reason and with bad, bad consequences. When a house fire happened when people were asleep – well, that was something that he prayed he wouldn’t hear over his radio when he was on nights.
He lit his cigarette and exhaled into the night sky. Eight and a half hours until he had to show up at work again. He started to play the ‘How many hours of sleep would I get if I went home right now?’ game in his head, which always sucked because the answer was inevitably ‘Not enough’. He needed to eat some dinner that wasn’t nachos or wings. He needed to eat something green that wasn’t fucking jalapenos. His leg was starting to ache and he was looking forward to getting home, taking his prosthesis off, getting into bed. He knew a guy from rehab whose dog kept stealing his prosthetic arm and running around with it every time he took it off. Bill wanted his own dog anyway, just like Frannie did.
The door swung open, and speak of the devil, there she was. She smiled at him like he was the person she’d been looking for, and then she reached out to delicately take the cigarette from his mouth before taking a drag on it. “Thanks,” she said, exhaling smoke, even though he hadn’t said yes and she hadn’t asked. “How you doing, Bill?”
He lit another cigarette and handed it over to her so they could switch and she got the new one and he got the half-gone smoke. “Not too bad. I like Babe. He’s a good kid.”
“Yeah, he seems sweet. He told me Doc won’t use his name. Keeps calling him Heffron.” The corner of her mouth curled upwards in a smile.
“Sounds like Doc to me. And you know Babe ain’t really a name, anyway, so he’s got a point.”
“Yeah, I guess so.” Frannie exhaled a plume of smoke and leaned back next to him against the wall. He hadn’t brought his beer glass out with him and she offered him a sip from hers, which he took gratefully. Then after a moment she said, “I heard what you said in there, you know.”
He narrowed an eye at her. “What part?” he asked, although he already kind of knew.
She laughed. “You’re gonna make me say it, huh? About me being too good for you. You have to know that isn’t true.”
“Ehh, Fran.” He made a face. “We don’t have to talk about this.”
She nodded, and when he turned to glance at her he could see her familiar profile in the dark outlined in gold, her stubborn chin and her full bottom lip and her proud brow. “You remember how you asked me out once?”
“And you said no. Yeah, I remember.” He tried to keep his voice light, pressing his shoulder against hers. “It’s okay, Frannie. I got you in my life and that’s all that—”
“I keep wondering,” she interrupted, like he hadn’t even been talking, “if you’re ever gonna ask me again. Was it a one-time thing? You know, a once in a lifetime chance?”
His breath caught in his throat as he turned to look at her. Her eyes were on him now, her features shadowed and her expression inscrutable in the low light. “You wanna go out?” he asked her quickly, and watched as her face relaxed into a smile, so wide and easy that he wondered why he’d never asked her again.
“Yeah,” she told him. “Take me out for dinner, Bill. Then I’ll invite you back to my place for coffee and we’ll see how wild you really are.”
He found himself laughing then, bubbling over with happiness, and she was laughing too, that wide ugly laugh she only ever did when she was really happy and really sincere. He slipped an arm around her waist and drew her closer and she pressed into him, her smile so close to his, her eyes still full of stars. It was time to kiss her but a part of him didn’t want to, because he felt like this was the last part of the first half of his life, like when he pressed his mouth to hers he’d be slipping over into forever. And as gorgeous as that would be, the anticipation of it was the sweetest thing he’d ever felt. To have her in his arms, to have her arms around his neck and her gaze steady on his, to have his future right there. “This ain’t gonna be some temporary thing, you know that, right, Fran?” He wanted her to know that, he wanted her to be sure. “You know I’m serious.”
“Shut up, Bill,” she said. He could hear her smile in her voice, and then he felt her pressing a kiss to his cheekbone, and then the line of his jaw, and then the corner of his lips. Then she whispered, “Me too,” before he pressed his mouth to hers and kissed those words right off her lips. She leaned in closer to him, pressing the line of her body against his, the incredible combination of her taut muscles and soft curves. A first kiss where they both tasted like beer and nachos and cigarettes probably wasn’t for everyone but it felt right for them, starting out how they’d go on. She kissed like she meant it, which was no surprise at all because he knew that was how she approached everything that was important to her. He’d never felt so tied up in another human being, her soft hair and the curve of her back, the hitch of her breath, the way her eyelids dragged open and she looked him right in the eye before kissing him again and again, slower now, before they stilled, foreheads pressed together. When he looked at her again their eyelashes tangled together, they were so close. “You gotta get home,” she told him, and laughed when he kissed the side of her face. “Bill! It’s late. You need at least seven hours of sleep before a shift.”
“I know, I know.” He didn’t want to let go of her, maybe ever. “You’re off tomorrow, huh?”
“Good to know you learned my shift pattern,” she said.
“Shut up,” he growled, and felt her pull his hair lightly and laugh. “So I’ll swing by after work? Pick you up?”
“All right, baby.” She drew back and he felt like he’d been hit with lightning – was it possible to be hit by lightning in a good way? Because that was how he felt when she called him ‘baby’ for the first time. “You go home. Get to bed. I’m gonna do my strict mom face at the others until they get out too.”
“Show me it,” he demanded, and she did, eyebrows drawing together fiercely, and he laughed, kissing the furrow between them mostly because he could now. “See you tomorrow?” he asked.
“See you tomorrow,” she confirmed. He only lived a couple blocks down from the bar, mostly because he liked to be able to walk to and from work, but it felt extra good tonight, to be able to look back at her silhouette and to wave and to see her wave back. The door of the bar opened and he saw more familiar figures starting to stream out: Tab and Spina laughing at something Toye was saying, Johnny and Bull in deep conversation, and finally Doc and Babe, a few feet apart and conspicuously not talking to each other. He couldn’t bring himself to care; instead he turned around and lifted a hand in farewell to them all, heard a chorus of “Bye, Bill,” and “See ya tomorrow,” in return. Above the other voices he heard Frannie’s, higher and sweeter and meant only for him.