Page 15 of Misadventures Of A Single Mom

Montanans were very particular about their personal liberties, especially gun rights. Everyone had a gun and they knew how to use them. Mostly for hunting and a lot because they were constitutionally able. When it came to personal protection, in other states people shot first and asked questions later. In Montana, people were so friendly to a stranger they’d give them a cup of coffee before they shot them. So I wasn’t too concerned about being shot while exploring around a stranger’s house. But I let Ty go first.

Ty’s long legs ate up the distance around the garage and beat me to the concrete patio out back. He wasn’t in a rush, but he wasn’t one for dilly-dallying either. He peered in the glass of the back door then shook his head. I was walking up to join him when the wind kicked up again and I smelled eggs. Rotten eggs, and lots of them. It was overwhelming. I froze in my tracks. My heart stopped. Uh-oh.

“Ty,” I said. He must have heard something in my tone because he turned to look at me from the patio without hesitation. “I smell?—”

I saw his eyes change with awareness to an ‘oh shit’ look.

“Gas!” Ty grabbed my arm in a heartbeat and we bolted around the house away from the garage, opposite of the way we’d come. “Propane tank,” he said, breathing heavily as we jumped over an old lawnmower. “On the back side of the garage. We walked right past it. Not always dangerous, but we’re not sticking around to find out.”

I practically sprinted to keep up with him, my arm still in his grip. We’d turned the corner and were back in front of the house when I heard awhoomph. Not overly loud, but a weird sound as if a balloon had imploded. Ty practically yanked my arm from the socket as we sprinted to the drainage ditch by the road. Obviously, he knew whatwhoomphmeant and it wasn’t good. One second I was vertical, the next I was face down in weeds anddirt with all of Ty’s weight crushing me. I contemplated how his heavy breathing tickled my ear when…KABOOM.

It was a Batman comic KABOOM with the big word bubble and big capital letters—make that HUGE. Debris rained down on us for a full ten seconds. Ty slowly extricated himself from me and raised up onto one knee, brushing small bits of drywall and pink insulation from his back. I pushed myself up on my hands to see what had happened even though I had a pretty good idea.

“Not dangerous?” I questioned.

The left side of the house was no more. The garage had been blown to kingdom come. Only stumps of the lower walls remained attached to the foundation. The main part of the house was mostly intact, but the side closest to the garage was now nothing but a bunch of pieces all over the yard, the driveway and out into the street. Only the far right side remained intact, although most of the windows were blown out. Furniture and other household items littered the yard. A blender was three feet in front of us on the grass.

“Your truck,” I said, pointing to what was left of it. Somehow, the old fridge we’d seen in the garage had been hurled through the air in the explosion. And landed dead center on top of Ty’s truck.

5

Ty looked over his shoulder at the new addition to his truck. The avocado green side-by-side fridge was lodged in the front windshield and roof at a forty-five-degree angle. One door was wide open and frozen foods spilled out. He shook his head and swore. I only heard a few cuss words as he’d done it so quietly and the neighbor’s car alarm was going off. It could have been the ringing in my ears. It was hard to tell the difference.

A small fire sent black smoke up into the air where the back of the garage had been, but was minor enough not to set the whole house ablaze. The smell of cooked house blew on the breeze. As I couldn’t smell gas anymore, I had to assume it was all used up in the explosion when it launched the fridge through the air twenty feet.

Ty’s body was rigid, strung tight like a bow, but he didn’t shout or rant his anger like I would have if my car had been smooshed. When he turned to face me, he’d bottled it up tightly.

“Are you hurt?” He took my shoulders in his big hands and looked me up and down, probably checking for any broken bones, bowel evisceration or hangnails. Exposed nipples. His voice had a rough edge, his grip strong. I’d never seen suchintensity in his eyes before. This must’ve been the look he had in battle in the Middle East. No doubt he’d seen worse in war.

My sunglasses were no longer on my face. I’d scraped my knees and hands where I’d skidded in the dirt. It stung, but I felt lucky with just that. He pulled a weed from my hair. Dirt covered my shirt and I noticed there was a small rip at the shoulder.

I shook my head. Stunned. “The house just blew up.” Duh.

Ty pulled me into his arms in a fierce hug, my face pressed against his chest. His rock-hard chest. He smelled like soap, dirt and fire. I could feel his heartbeat pound against his ribs. At least the explosion affected him on a cardiovascular level.

God, it felt good to be held, to be comforted by a man. A man who was actually worried about me, that the reason for his tight grip was because he was reassuring himself I was whole.

One of the black shutters fell from the second floor and landed in a juniper.

“I know you’ve seen lots of crazy things with the fire department and stuff I can’t even imagine with the army, but in my little world houses don’t just blow up,” I said into his shirt.

“In everybody’s world houses don’t just blow up,” he said, his lips at my temple. “Not from a propane tank. This house had help.”

An hour later,I sat in a vintage lawn chair—the kind with the colored woven plastic from 1974—supplied by the elderly couple who lived across the street. I positioned myself in their driveway, a mug of coffee in hand—I told you Montanans were friendly—and watched the action across the street. The sun was warm and my shirt stuck to my body, damp with perspiration. The scalding hot coffee wasn’t very refreshing, but no one could see my handsstill shaking while I held the cup. Mr. and Mrs. Huffman sat on either side of me, running a constant chatter about their suspicions.

“Those propane tanks are such a danger. I lay in bed thinking we’ll be blown up any minute,” Mrs. Huffman said. She had long white hair pulled up into a bun at the back of her head in a style reminiscent ofLittle House on the Prairie. She had a sweet disposition and was a Nervous Nelly.

Mr. Huffman was the complete opposite. Short and round, he’d be a great Santa Claus at the mall. Except for his carrot red hair and lack of beard. Even somewhere in his seventies, his hair was still red. “For Pete’s sake, Helen. You snore through this ridiculous worry of yours every night. Propane tanks don’t just blow up. There has to be some kind of ignition, a spark. I think we’re safer with our propane tank than on the city’s natural gas lines.” Mr. Huffman harrumphed and settled into his lawn chair, arms folded across his ample belly.

I actually couldn’t blame Mrs. Huffman her worries, or Mr. Huffman his grievance with public works. The whole town had been on edge about gas explosions since 2009 when one morning, a block of Main Street blew up. No warnings, just boom. Sadly, a woman was killed and an entire city block blown to smithereens when, by accounts, she’d done nothing more than flip a light switch. The gas lines that ran to the downtown buildings were ancient, 1930s old and cracked. Gas had seeped into the ground and up into the building. I’d been just down the street at the time when it happened. I had been a bit too close for comfort on Main that morning, and now once again.

I never really thought about how I got my furnace to work before the downtown explosion and realized I took quite a bit for granted. I lived in the city linked up to the public gas lines where, by all accounts, I shouldn’t be concerned. As my house was builtin the fifties, my gas lines couldn’t be more than fifty-some years old. No problems. Or so I made myself believe.

Out here, the garage sale house—the entire neighborhood—used propane. Propane heat, the stove and water heater. There weren’t any old underground pipes, just a separate tank behind each house. So, what caused this explosion?

A county sheriff patrol car and one fire truck remained. It, of course, was from the volunteer fire department that had hosted the lovely pancake breakfast the weekend before. Outside of city boundaries, the home was serviced by the volunteers, not the paid city fire department.

Once they remembered me from Zach’s horn incident, they quickly looked me over and I was deemed unharmed by the paramedics, then kindly removed to the Huffman’s yard across the street. Ample distance away from the fire truck and its horn. Obviously, they didn’t want a repeat performance from a member of the West family. As if.

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