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TODAY, WE ARE THRILLED TO WELCOME BACK, OUR GUEST AUTHOR, ANNIE CARLISLE, WHO IS SHARING CHAPTER ONE OF HER NOVEL, 'FLASH OVER' #RWRTeamBlog #ReadWriteRepeat

  • 3 days ago
  • 11 min read

Chapter One - Grady


Copper Ridge sprawls across the valley like it got comfortable and never bothered getting up.


The van crests the last hill on Route 12 and there it is ’the whole town spread below us, tucked between mountains that look like they showed up first and the town built itself around them as an afterthought. Trees everywhere. A river cutting through the south end, catching the afternoon sun. Neighborhoods climbing the slopes in no particular hurry. A main drag with actual storefronts, a church steeple poking above the tree line, and somewhere down there, a firehouse with our names on it for the summer.


"That's it?" Navarro says from the back seat.


"That's it." Diaz doesn't look up from his tablet. "Station 7. Structural crew. Captain named Delano."


"Population?"Navarro asks.


"Does it matter?"


"It matters to me recreationally."


"Then you're going to have a long summer."


"Big enough for a Walmart?"


"No."


"Target?"


"Also no."


Navarro sighs.


"Then what do people do?"


"Talk about each other," Diaz says.


"And fish" DeLuca adds from the third row.


"Those seem unrelated."


"Give it a week."


Navarro sinks back in his seat. He's young enough that a summer without a bar scene still qualifies as a crisis. I remember being that young. Vaguely. The way you remember a song you used to know the words to.


The Clearwater Interagency Hotshot Crew rolls into Copper Ridge on a warm afternoon in late June ’three vehicles and enough gear to make the parking situation at Station 7 immediately complicated. We're here because the Pacific Northwest is having the kind of fire season that makes the national news. Drought since spring, beetle pine stacking fuel loads across the mountains, and a forecast that reads less like weather and more like a warning. District 6 wants a Type 1 crew pre-positioned, and this is the staging base.


Fine by me. Better than fine. The last deployment ended two weeks ago and the downtime almost did me in ’two weeks in a motel in Bend, running trails until my body asked me to please stop, calling my sister Tess because the silence in the room kept getting louder. Which isn't how silence works. My brain doesn't care.


Fire season is the only calendar that makes sense to me.


Towns never did.


Towns expected things.


They wanted roots and routines and favorite booths at diners.


Fire season wanted a duffel bag and a pulse.


Fire season and I understood each other.


Fire season is loud and structured and tells me exactly where to be and what to do with my hands, and the alternative is standing in a motel room staring at a ceiling, and I've memorized that ceiling, and I'd rather not.


Station 7 announces itself with a hand-carved wooden sign that probably cost more than my first truck and a brick facade with STATION 7 painted in letters that have been retouched so many times the font has evolved. The apparatus bay is open, an engine gleaming inside, chrome and red, and the whole place smells like drip coffee and something ambitious happening on a stove somewhere.


Captain Beck Delano meets us in the bay. Measured handshake. Eyes that do a full scan without making a production out of it. "Delano," he says. "Welcome to 7. Your quarters are in the back. Let's get you settled."


We start unloading gear, which is when Cal Larsen appears.


Cal is broader in the shoulders than seems strictly necessary and walks like he's never once considered not taking up space. He crosses the bay in three strides, shakes my hand, and says, "Larsen. You need help with those?"


He does not wait for an answer. He picks up two of my bags, tucks a duffel under one arm, and starts talking. He covers the bunkroom layout. The shower schedule. The coffee maker, which he describes as "a crime against the Geneva Convention." His sister's engagement ’recent, his voice doing something careful around the edges of it. The hiking trail behind the station. His thoughts on the trail. His thoughts on hiking generally. A comprehensive review of a bar called the Watershed, including its burger ranking relative to bars he's visited across a geographical range I stop tracking.


Somewhere during his assessment of the Watershed's jukebox selection, he carries my bags directly past the bunkroom and toward the equipment closet.


"That's the ’that's not where those go," I say.


Cal looks at the bags. Looks at the closet. Looks at me. "Right." He reverses course. He does not stop talking. He is now on the topic of fuel moisture readings he pulled yesterday, which he is apparently not qualified to pull but which nobody has technically told him to stop pulling, and I'm starting to understand that Cal Larsen is what happens when a golden retriever gets a fire science degree.


He waves at three separate people while saying it.


None of them are part of the conversation.


"Cal." Beck's voice, from across the bay. Just the name. One syllable.


Cal stops walking. The talking takes another full second to wind down, like an engine idling after the key's been turned. He grins. "Captain says I talk too much." Leans closer. "Captain is correct but will never hear me say so."


Derek Kowalski introduces himself with a handshake and a smirk that seems to be his permanent resting expression. "Kowalski. Welcome." That's it. Two words and a facial expression that communicates everything Cal's monologue communicated, but in a format you could fit on a Post-it note. He walks me to the overflow quarters — bunks lined against the far wall — and points at the last one, closest to the bathroom door. "That one." He walks away before I can ask why.


Hanna Larsen — lCal''s sister, paramedic, ring on her left hand she keeps reaching for without realizing — is warm and direct. She asks what we need. She means it. She doesn't hover.


Gemma Lockhart, the other paramedic, hands me a coffee. The mug is chipped. The coffee is the color of something you'd find at the bottom of a creek in late October.


Everyone watches me take the first sip.


Every single person in this apparatus bay is watching me drink this coffee.


It tastes like someone boiled a boot and then felt bad about it and added water. My face does something I can't control. Beck, across the bay, is watching me the way a chef watches someone taste their signature dish.


"It's — " I search for a word that is technically not a lie. "Strong."


"Strong," Gemma repeats, flat. "Sure."


"I make it myself," Beck says. With pride. Genuine, earned, completely misplaced pride.


"You can tell," Gemma says.


Beck nods, satisfied. He heard a compliment. The man heard a compliment. Gemma catches my eye across the bay and the look she gives me says: we've all tried. Nobody has the heart. You will drink this coffee every day for the entire summer and you will say nothing, and this is your life now.


After we';re settled, I walk. I can't not walk ’the quarters are fine, the bunk is fine, everything is fine, and the fineness of it is making my skin itch because fine means still, and still isn't something my body does voluntarily.


Copper Ridge is bigger than it looked from the hill. The main drag runs through the center of the valley with storefronts on both sides — a feed store, a hardware place, a real estate office, a library. Side streets climb the slopes toward neighborhoods hidden in the trees. A gas station at the south end doubles as something involving bait, which feels ambitious. The river cuts below town, visible between buildings, and the mountains sit on every horizon like they're not going anywhere and neither should you.


I end up at Peak Grounds because it's the farthest point from the station I can walk without technically leaving town, and because the sign in the window says COFFEE in letters large enough to constitute a civic promise.


Peak Grounds is a shoebox of a coffee shop on the corner of Pine and Third, green awning, warm wood paneling visible through the window. Inside: mismatched mugs on open shelving, a chalkboard menu featuring a drink called The Widow-Maker, and the smell of roasted beans and something buttery coming from the back.


The man behind the counter has dark-rimmed glasses, a beard that looks less styled than inevitable, and the stillness of someone who has made peace with not talking. His name, according to nothing ’there's no name tag, no introduction ’remains a mystery until a woman in scrubs waves on her way out and says, "Thanks, Micah."


Micah nods. Pours me a coffee without being asked, which is apparently how things work in this town — people decide what you're consuming and you go along with it.


The coffee is extraordinary. Dark roast, no frills, made by someone who understands that coffee's job is to be coffee and anything else is a distraction. After Beck's boot-water, this tastes like an apology from the entire concept of caffeine.


"You';re with the hotshot crew," Micah says. The first full sentence he's offered all day.


A woman near the window looked up from her laptop.


"The wildfire guys?"


"Apparently."


She nods once.


"Good."


Then goes back to whatever she’s doing.


Nobody explained why.


"That obvious?"


He looks at my boots. Looks at the Nomex peeking out of my collar. Looks back at me.


"Yeah," he says, and after Cal Larsen, this feels like a spa treatment for my entire nervous system. I order a second cup. Micah pours it with the same wordless efficiency. I hold up the mug and nod. He nods. We have conducted a complete transaction without involving a single unnecessary syllable, and I'm beginning to think Micah might be my favorite person in Copper Ridge.


By the time the storefronts start closing and the light goes amber on the mountains, I've walked the town end to end and my legs have run out of streets. The Watershed sits on Main Street and looks exactly like what it is: a hardware store that woke up one morning, decided to start serving beer, and never bothered to remodel. The shelves behind the bar are lined with Mason jars. The walls are hung with vintage fire department photographs and one mounted fish that has clearly been here longer than anyone currently alive. The tables are solid wood. The stools are upholstered in what appears to be repurposed saddle leather. A jukebox in the corner is doing something mournful with a steel guitar.


Big Jim Kowalski is behind the bar. He makes a room feel smaller by standing in it ’tall, wide through the shoulders, gray beard, hands that could probably open a jar that's been sealed since the last administration. His name tag says Big Jim, and I don't see a small version of him anywhere, so I'm going to assume the adjective is permanent.


I sit at the bar. "Can I get a — "


He's already pouring. A pint of something amber slides across the wood toward me before I finish the sentence. He looks at me the way Beck looked at the fire weather briefing earlier — assessing, calculating, not sharing the results.


";You're with the crew." He says it like a fact he's confirming for the record.


"Yes sir."


Big Jim nods. One nod. It's the most efficient piece of communication I've encountered today, and I spent an afternoon with Cal Larsen. "You eat yet?" He doesn't wait for an answer. He turns to the kitchen window and says, "Burger."


A woman two stools down muttered,


"Don';t answer."


"Why?"


"Because he's already decided."


I've been in Copper Ridge for less than a day and I'm starting to understand the town';s operating system: other people decide what you eat and drink, Micah controls the flow of information by withholding it, Cal controls the flow of information by drowning you in it, and Derek communicates primarily through his face. On a fire line, I make decisions that affect the lives of my entire crew. In Copper Ridge, I can't order my own dinner.


A woman at the end of the bar catches my eye. "He does this with new people,"she says."It's adoption. You can';t fight it."


Big Jim ignores her. Big Jim, I&'m starting to realize, hears exactly what he wants to hear and politely discards the rest. The burger, when it arrives, is exceptional. The beer is cold. The jukebox has moved on to something equally mournful but in a different key, and the mounted fish watches me eat with an expression I'd describe as resigned.


A pickup slows beside the curb.


The passenger window comes down.


A woman in her seventies leans across the seat.


"You're one of the wildfire boys."


Not a question.


"'That's me."


"Good."


The window goes up.


The truck drives away.


I stand there.


Three seconds later it stops again.


The window comes down.


";Don't buy tomatoes from the market"


"Okay?"


"They're terrible."


The truck leaves.


I never learn her name.


The walk back to the station is longer than it needs to be because my feet take the route that has the most distance in it. Past the closed storefronts. Along the river, where the water sounds like something you'd pay money to hear on a sleep app. Up the hill toward the station, where the crew quarters are lit and somebody's laughing.


My phone buzzes.


Tess: How's the new town?


Tess: Scale of 1 to ceiling.


She means the motel ceiling in Bend. The one I memorized because the alternative was closing my eyes, and closing my eyes means the quiet, and the quiet has a sound I don't want to hear. She doesn't say this. She doesn';t have to. Tess speaks in shorthand because she's been watching me run from the same thing long enough to stop counting and she's given up trying to name it directly.


Me: Town's got good coffee and a bar with a fish that judges you. I'm fine.


The lie comes automatically. So automatically I don';t even feel it leave my mouth anymore.


Tess: You're always fine.


Me: See? Consistent.


Tess: That's not the selling point you think it is.


She sends a heart emoji and I put the phone away and stand on the sidewalk and breathe. In through the nose. Out through the mouth. The trick the department counselor taught me before I stopped going because talking about it was worse than carrying it, and carrying it was already plenty. I don't think about why the quiet is loud. I've gotten good at not thinking about it, the way you get good at anything — practice and repetition and refusing to let the thing you're avoiding sit still long enough to become a shape you have to name.


The air smells like pine and dust and river water. And underneath all of it, just barely, dry brush. The ridge above town is golden and brittle in the fading light, and somewhere up there the fuel loads are waiting for a spark the way they always wait — patient, inevitable, a season's worth of kindling pretending to be scenery.


The firehouse porch is cool and empty. The bench is overbuilt in the way that firehouse furniture always is, like someone designed it to survive the same events the crew does. Inside, the station is settling — laughter through the walls, boots on the stairs, the particular sound of a place where people belong to each other.


Diaz comes out. Stands at the railing. Looks at the same ridge I'm looking at.


"Scanner's got something east of town," he says. "Small. Brush fire. Probably nothing."


My shoulders come forward. My weight shifts to the balls of my feet. Somewhere between the river and the ridge, something is burning, and my whole body knows it before my brain catches up.


"But we'll monitor."


Something is burning.


**********



**********


Annie Carlisle - Author
Annie Carlisle - Author


AUTHOR BIO


Annie Carlisle writes small-town romance with heart, humor, and just enough heat to keep things interesting. Her books are filled with strong heroines, swoon-worthy heroes, loyal dogs, quirky towns, and happily-ever-afters that feel like coming home.


A former paramedic and married to a retired law enforcement officer, Annie has seen her fair share of real-life drama. These days, she'd much rather create it on the page. When she's not writing, she's usually spending time with her husband, spoiling her dogs, attending book signings, or adding yet another story idea to the list she swears she'll get to someday.


Whether she's taking readers to a cozy beach town or a snowy Alaskan mountain community, Annie's goal is always the same: leave readers smiling, laughing, and believing in happily-ever-after.


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