Page 6 of Smoke Season

But Astor cooed, “Coool.”

“Sam?” Claude added, “you still got that John Deere in your side yard? Got it juiced up?”

“Think so.” They’d saved it from repossession the last time Annie’s hospital bills had ballooned out of control, Sam able to claim it in some roundabout way for work.

“I thought I’d go ahead and mow the back acre,” Claude said, “between the houses, just in case.”

Sam felt a lurch of regret. He’d been meaning to get back up there to mow—standard fire-deterrent practice for any homeowner out here on the wildland-urban line—but had kept putting it off. Seeing the house that had once embodied so much hope always pressed on the still-tender parts of his heart. “I can’t ask you to do that, Claude.”

Why hadn’t he just mowed it last month, instead of spending his free evenings trying to find elusive profits in the columns of numbers in the Eddy business ledgers, or worse, on halfhearted nights out with True, who was ill-equipped to cheer him up, seeing as she was nearly as gutted about his family situation as he was? “I’ve been meaning to get that done,” he said lamely.

Claude pshaw-ed. “You gotta give an old guy something to do in his retirement years, or else he starts feeling less useful. Anyway, you’ve got your hands full.”

Claude was being kind. What he didn’t say:You have enough on your mind, working your own business, raising two kids, and trying not to drown under medical bills in sums bigger than any of us will ever see in a lifetime, let alone pay off in a year.

“Relief is in sight,” Mel kept saying, though Sam couldn’t see how. Sure, her making chief had taken the edge off, enabling them to pay a few of the bigger bills to their Portland pediatric clinic and the cardiological-specialist group, but still left Sam playing his least-favorite guessing game: pay the electric bill or home oxygen delivery? Car payment or echocardiogram? And there was still a pile of unpaid invoices as long as his arm, all with overdue notices stamped in red ink.

He sighed into the phone, imagining seventy-five-year-old Claude making the turns up and down the field in this heat, struggling with his old mower. “I’ll come up and do it myself first thing in the morning, Claude,” he promised. “I just don’t want to leave the girls here alone.” Even if he asked Kim to come by and babysit, he didn’t trust the likesof Fallows to keep to his own lane, not after turning up today. The very thought of him interacting with his kids made Sam’s blood boil all over again.

“I got it, Bishop,” Claude insisted. “You just take care of that little one of yours. Unless her big sis has already worked you out of a job.” He chuckled.

“You sure?”

“Absolutely. Where I come from, neighbors take care of one another.”

Sam smiled, knowing that, while Claude might have grown up outside of Munich, Germany, he considered himself an Oregonian through and through. “We sure do,” he agreed, ending the call as gratitude replaced the stress his earlier confrontation had placed on his heart.

An hour later, he’d settled the girls into bed on the pull-out sofa and retreated to the River Eddy deck one story below, PBR in hand. He liked to come out here on summer evenings to watch the sun set over the river, but tonight he faced the opposite direction, staring up at Flatiron. Claude was right: they certainly had a nature show to watch. Even here in town, he could glimpse the flames undulating like a well-choreographed dance just one ridge over.

Carbon’s seen fires before,he told himself firmly. The Bear Creek Fire of ’92, the Pine Flat Fire of ’05 ... both worse than this. And Mel had handled those just fine, hadn’t she? By late summer, it wasn’t uncommon for over a dozen fires to burn across the state. But early July? Smoke season had come early. Sam figured he’d better make peace with losing his view, as well as his out-of-town customers.

If the air quality got bad enough, he’d have to keep Annie indoors tomorrow, and the next day, and the day after that, where medical-grade air purifiers hummed day and night in both the Eddy apartment and in Mel’s place across town. Painfully unfair for a kid on summer break, and especially for Annie, who’d already been robbed of too much of her childhood.

The doctor and midwife had known something was wrong the moment she’d been born by C-section at Carbon General. Though their faces had remained professionally neutral, it had been the heavy silence throughout the sterile room that gave them away, punctuated by Annie’s weak cry after far too long a delay. Later, Mel would liken that moment to the silence right before thepopsignifying a combustion fire ... when all the air seemed to go still before being sucked right out of the room.

Sam scrubbed his hands across his face, trying, unsuccessfully, to rub out the memory. No dice. It rushed right back in like a back draft in the gas line on the Eddy grill, same as always.

Annie’s diagnosis after a barrage of tests: tetralogy of Fallot. Tet, for short. Sam had never even heard of the condition, and no wonder. Only four hundred out of every million babies were born with the complex congenital heart condition that left baby Annie weak, winded, and hypoxemic.

The first thing you think, after being informed you have a child with intense medical needs:Just tell me how to meet them.Let’s go,what’s it gonna take,time’s a-wasting, all that. He and Mel, they’d been a dream team, getting second opinions, meeting with experts, finding time, even in the thick of it, for a hand squeeze here, a bracing hug there, even a lingering kiss or two in the sanctuary of the half-remodeled Highline house, Mel’s arms around him enough to keep him together. Back then, the pillars of the life they’d constructed had seemed load-bearing. The foundation solid. Sam had thought they’d weather it, he really had. But he hadn’t seen the wolf at the door.

First the insurance advocates had called—their tones always clipped but friendly—then the doctors—still helpful—and clinics and registered pediatric RNs—more businesslike. Then the collectors. Who had proved to be worse bloodsucking bastards than the drug runners and car thieves Sam had grown up around.

Sam and Mel had burned through their savings first, though that hadn’t taken long. Then the credit-card debt began to pile up. Mel hadreluctantly turned to her parents and True, but lord knew Sam’s dad, his only family, had nothing to give.

“Contact John if you need some cash flow,” Mark Bishop had said, on one of Sam’s last visits to see his old man in the state penitentiary at Pendleton. “He owes this family big time.”

Wasn’tthatrich. Sam had pushed back from the table between them like it was on fire, the legs of his folding chair screeching across the linoleum of the visitation room.

“That would require us to be afamilyin the first place,” he’d shot at his father. Sam and Mark Bishop were anything but, in no small part due to Fallows’s intrusion in their lives.

“Just let me know when you’re ready to swallow your pride,” Mark had called after him, the clatter of metal echoing in Sam’s ears.

He’d tried to rent out the rooms over the garage at Highline instead, had even tried to convert the garage itself, but couldn’t get past the red tape of the Airbnb contract. Too many code violations while he finished the wiring and the drywall in the kitchen. Too hard to ensure the space met ADA requirements. Things had been tense before, but to hear that Sam couldn’t even manage to wire his own house well enough to run a small business tipped the scales. He was a failure. He had let down his family.

“No one said anything of the sort,” Mel had argued, exasperation lacing the exhaustion and fear in her voice. “Certainly not me.” And of course she hadn’t, not in so many words, but Sam was more than capable of filling in the blanks.

The arguments turned into days of silence, then outright absence as Mel poured herself into work and childcare, her embrace reserved only for her children now. To be fair, that might have been all she had to give after the hours she put in at the station. At the hospital. At the heart center. In a last-ditch effort to salvage what he could of his marriage and their finances, Sam had put the Eddy on the market, with no luck on either count. No one else in economically depressed Carbon wanted totake it on. And Mel, even knowing what it had cost Sam emotionally to list it, had not been moved.

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