Chasing Fire

experiences of the work, the life, the risks, the rewards.”
    “You want me to talk to kids?”
    “Yes. I want you to talk to them. I want you to teach them. Hear me out,” she added when he just stared at her. “A lot of our students come from privilege, from parents who can afford to send them to a top-rated private school like ours. Everyone knows about the Zulies. The base is right here. But I’ll guarantee few, if any, unless they have a connection, understand what it really means to be what you are, do what you do.”
    “I’m not a jumper anymore.”
    “Lucas.” The soft smile teased out the dimples. “You’ll always be one. In any case, you gave it half of your life. You’ve seen the changes in the process, the equipment. You’ve fought wilderness fires all over the West. You’ve seen the beauty and the horror. You’ve felt it.”
    She laid a fisted hand on her heart. “Some of these kids, the ones I’d especially like to reach with this, have attitudes. The hard work, the dirty work, that’s for somebody else—somebody who doesn’t have the money or brains to go to college, launch a lucrative career. The wilderness? What’s the big deal? Let somebody else worry about it.”
    She’d tripped something in him the minute she’d said he’d always be a jumper. The minute he saw she understood that.
    “I don’t know how me talking to them’s going to change that.”
    “I think listening to you, being able to ask you questions, having you take them through, from training to fire, will open some of those young minds.”
    “And that’s what your work is. Even though you don’t teach anymore, you’ll always be a teacher.”
    “Yes. We understand that about each other.” She watched him as she sipped her drink. “I intend to talk to the operations officer at base. I’d like to, with parental permission, have a group, or groups, go through training. A shortened version obviously. Maybe over a weekend after the fire season.”
    “You want to put them through the wringer,” he said with a glimmer of a smile.
    “I want to show them, teach them, bring it home to them that the men and women who dedicate themselves to protecting our wilderness put themselves through the wringer. I have ideas about photographs and videos, and . . . I have ideas,” she said with a laugh. “And we’d have all summer to put the project together.”
    “I think it’s a good thing you’re trying to do. I’m not much good at speaking. Public speaking.”
    “I can help you with that. Besides, I’d rather you just be who you are. Believe me, that’s enough.”
    She picked up one of the potato skins the waitress had served while she’d laid out her plan.
    She’d caught him up in it, he couldn’t deny it. The idea of it, the passion behind it. “I can give it a try, I guess. At least see how it goes.”
    “That would be great. I really think we can do something that has impact—and some fun. And that brings me to two things.” She took another drink. “Let me just get this off the table. I was married for twenty-eight years. I uprooted myself, then my kids as well to support and suit my husband. I loved him, almost all of those twenty-eight years, and for the last of them, I believed in the marriage, the life we’d built. I believed in him. Until on my fifty-second birthday, he took me out to dinner. A beautiful restaurant, candles, flowers, champagne. He even had a rather exquisite pair of diamond earrings for me to top it off.”
    She sat back a little, crossed her legs. “All of this to set it up, so I wouldn’t cause a public scene when he told me he was having an affair with his personal assistant—a woman young enough to be his daughter, by the way. That he was in love with her and leaving me. He still thought the world of me, of course, and hoped I’d understand that these things happened. Oh, and the heart wants what the heart wants.”
    “I’m sorry. I’m trying to think what I should say, but nothing that’s coming into my head seems appropriate.”
    “Oh, it can’t be any less appropriate than what I said—after I picked up the champagne bucket and dumped the ice over his head. When I went to a lawyer—the very next day—she asked if I wanted to play nice or cut him off at the balls. I went for castration. I’d finished playing nice.”
    “Good for you.”
    “I wondered if I would regret it. But so far, no. I’m telling you this because I think it’s only fair that you