“I saw you run for the bathroom, and I thought maybe you were sick. All this smoke in the air…”
Mel chuckled. “I called Walt’s house to check on the kids and heard Emma crying. It’s been too long since I nursed her. In seconds, I was dripping,” she said, pulling aside the white coat to show a large round wet spot on her breast. “I hope they get this fire under control before I explode.”
Muriel smiled. “I didn’t have children. And I guess you need to get back to yours.”
“I’m sure it won’t be much longer. Really, this has to be resolved soon. Don’t you think?” Mel asked.
“I don’t know, Mel,” she said, shaking her head. “There’s a lot of wood out there. It’s scary.”
“Yeah,” Mel said weakly. “Yeah it sure is.”
Walt was making sandwiches with Muriel. “You know, I’ve been hanging around your place, riding with you, throwing the stick for your dogs, and I never asked you about the husbands. Like, how many? And why you think it didn’t work out?”
“What makes you think I feel like telling you?” she asked.
“Aw, you’ll tell me,” he said. “You’re just that kinda gal. And I told you about my wife.”
“Okay,” she said, still slapping sandwiches together. “The synopsis. The first one was fifteen years older than me, my agent. He’s still my agent—he married the talent, not the person I was. He was very ambitious for me, for us both. He still thinks I divorced him because of his age, but I divorced him because all he cared about was my career. I don’t think he could tell you my favorite color…”
“Yellow,” Walt said.
Her head snapped around and she stared at him. “Yellow,” she said.
“That was easy,” he said. “It’s all around and you wear it a lot. Red’s important, too.”
“Right,” she said, shocked. She shook herself. “Okay, number two hit, number three cheated, number four had a child he failed to mention, number five—”
“All right, wait,” Walt said. “Is this going to go on for a real long time?”
She grinned at him. “Didn’t you look it up on the Internet?”
“I did not,” he said, almost insulted.
“We’re stopping at five. He had a substance-abuse problem. I didn’t know about it beforehand, obviously. I tried to help, but I was in the way—he needed to be on his own. That’s when I decided that, really, I should quit doing that. Marrying. But please understand, it’s not all my fault—Hollywood doesn’t exactly have a reputation for long, sturdy relationships. I did the best I could.”
“I have no doubt,” he said.
“Do you say that because you have no doubt? Or are you being a sarcastic ass to a poor woman who had to go through five miserable husbands?”
He chuckled. Then he slipped an arm around her waist and kissed her cheek. It was the first time he’d been that bold. He’d been riding with her, showing up at her house to drink wine while they sat on lawn chairs in front of the bunkhouse, even talking to her almost daily on the phone, but he hadn’t gotten physical. “The Army was rough on families, too. I was lucky.”
“Hmm,” she said. “Maybe you’re just better at it than me.”
“I suppose that’s possible, too,” he said. Then he smiled at her.
The men fighting the fire grew dry and tired. They’d worked their way into the forest along a line that had grown wide and deep. Jack leaned against his shovel as Mike Valenzuela passed by with a chain saw, headed up the line to cut boughs from more felled trees. He paused for a drink and took a few deep breaths before bending to his job of turning earth, tossing dirt onto a growing pile that formed a small dike against the forest. Mike moved down the line of men, out of sight. Jack wiped his forehead and put the shovel back to the ground.
Then something subtle happened. The slight breeze that Jack had been feeling on the back of his neck changed to a hot wind that hit him full in the face. Frowning, he began to walk up the line and around the curve in the direction Valenzuela had gone, looking for the source of that sudden heat. As the logging road went deeper into the trees, the volunteers thinned out and the professionals were the ones moving closer to the fire.
A murmur went up among the men and sparks filled the air. The line of men that had been winding around the hill to his left began to move toward him, then past him. Jack didn’t see Mike anywhere, so he walked a little farther. He quickly saw that there was no one back there. Behind him, from where he had been, he heard, “Move out, move out, move out!”