Waiting for Sparks
“Man moratorium!” Her voice squeaked on the last part of moratorium.
He must have landed on her harder than he’d thought. “Did you hit your head?”
She ignored his question. “Are you sure you’re okay? Maybe I should take you to Regional for that cut on your chin. I’m...I’m headed in that direction.” Her voice sounded decidedly nervous.
He blamed himself for scaring her. Of course, taking a strange, bloody guy into your car was a risk. “No, ma’am. I’m a former smoke jumper and I’ve taken some pretty good bangs to the head before. I appreciate it, but a ride to the Safari Motel is good enough for me.”
Silence.
The knock on his head had opened a memory he’d slammed the door on five years ago. The tragedy that had driven him from a once-loved occupation and a part of his life that he was trying to forget.
A few more miles passed by, and the road flattened a bit before another plunge. She gestured to the left. “You can’t see much at night, but that’s the lake down there. Route 12 is Main Street.” So this was Heaven, his borrowed hometown for the summer.
This spurt of conversation seemed to empty her, and she once again fell silent.
Keeping his eyes on the darkness that was the lake, he leaned against the headrest and gave himself over to the pain. “Never expected such a big lake in the Rocky Mountains,” he muttered to himself. Talking to himself was a habit he’d had since he was a kid. Some counselor had told him he did it so he wouldn’t feel alone. He hadn’t wanted to think about that then, and he didn’t want to think about it tonight.
She didn’t respond.
“Heaven’s a different name for a town,” he said, this time louder.
The silence spread so long he thought she wasn’t going to answer, and then she shook herself slightly as though to rouse herself from troubling thoughts. “The original settlers had such a hard time coming down that canyon—” she flashed him a look “—as you can imagine, that when they came to this point and saw the bizarre blue of the lake, they figured they’d died and gone to heaven. Hence the name.”
Everyone had told Sparks he was crazy to take a cut-rate job designing fireworks in the middle of nowhere. When he’d been sitting with his feet dangling over the edge of the wrecked car door, he would have had to agree. Now, seeing the size of the lake and with a summer to play in it, he began to doubt his doubts. He could entertain himself watching the spin cycle in a Laundromat and make five new friends before he’d even folded his polo shirts. He would amuse himself in Heaven and get back into sync with his career. A win-win for him and the town.
In fact...he eyed the petite woman next to him. He’d get a summer girl. Summer girls didn’t need to know why he couldn’t stick around.
The uncomfortable niggling at the back of his mind, the keening loss that often surged within him, kicked in again. He’d been feeling it off and on for months now. A place to call home. A place to be from. Come back to. Sparks touched the cut on his forehead. It had stopped bleeding.
Shooting a sideways look at his angel girl, he wondered where she was from, where she was going. She’d said a hospital. Local girl with a sick husband? He sighed. He hoped not.
Minutes later, she braked at a four-way stop sign with a Qwik Stop in need of a paint job on one corner. The other three corners were the edges of fields that gave way to Main Street.
“It looks like...home,” he blurted as yet another crash sounded in his head.
“Don’t bet on it.” Her muttering landed so softly he wasn’t sure he’d actually heard her. After she stopped on Main Street in front of the Safari Motel and put the car in Park, she turned to look at him—or rather, the cut on his forehead. Then she smiled.
Her smile curved up wide, showing white teeth with a tiny overlap of the right incisor. The move pressed her eyes into a delightful squint. He was glad she’d been coming down the canyon when she had. In the reflected light from the motel’s office, he saw coppery highlights glinting in her dark hair. A pretty woman preoccupied with something. After her rescuing him, he wanted to make everything right for her. Keep that smile on her face.
Finally, she spoke. “Looks as if Lynette kept the light on for you. She’ll want to know why you look as though you got beat up. She’s not much on troublemakers staying at her motel.” The smile faded and the tone sharpened. “Or unreliable, undependable charmers.” She closed her lips in a thin line.
“You’re from here?” His spirits lifted; he’d choose to ignore the edge to her last words. Summer girl. For the summer, he could be anything she wanted. For the summer.
A look swept over her face. Revulsion? Regret? He couldn’t place it.
“Not really.”
He slid slowly out of the car, emitting a few spontaneous grunts as he pulled his suitcases out of the backseat. “Thanks for rescuing me.”
Her smile returned, lightening her expression. “You rescued me from rescuing you. We’re square.”
As he came around the front of the car, he spoke in the direction of her open window. “See you around, then?”
She leaned out the window. “I’ll call on my cell about your car. The garage will contact the rental company.”
“Hey, no problem. I’ll call from my room.”
Another transforming smile. “I’ll call.” She put the Omni in Drive.
“Thank you for saving my life!” he shouted belatedly as she left the parking lot. She didn’t look back. He knew because he watched her. She knew where he was, so maybe...
Digging a piece of paper out of his jeans’ pocket, Sparks gingerly felt around the scrape on his chin. He leaned over, stretching right and left to unravel the increasing kinks, while checking out his home for forty-six glorious days of vacation. To the right was a line of single-level motel units of cinder block with a metal, aqua-painted eaves running their length as they sloped down away to the lake. Probably built in the 1950s.
He pushed open the glass door of the office and the bell at the top of the door tinkled; the theme song for a late-night talk show sounded in a room behind the desk. He was hours past his guaranteed reservation time. As his hand hovered over the bell on the counter for a second time, a bouffant-haired older woman pushed through the bead curtain.
“Don’t be pounding that bell. At my age, it takes more time to get everything moving.” Of average height, a loose black pullover tunic and legs encased in black knit pants, she didn’t look as though she had an ounce of fat on her. Taking in his damaged face, her eyes narrowed. “You got a reservation? We don’t allow riffraff here.”
Sparks glanced at the confirmation number on his piece of paper and passed it over to her. She snatched it from his hand.
“You’re Lynette?” he said.
Looking up from the paper, she seemed satisfied with his right to be there. “I’m the owner, Lynette.” She peered at him over half glasses. “You’re that hotshot fireworks designer who’s going to put Heaven on the map this year.” She swung her head back and forth. Her hair never moved. “Why do you look as though you lost a fight at the Wayside Inn?”
“I had an accident coming down Bigelow Canyon.”
“The Last Nasty, no doubt. Going too fast, I imagine. Happens all the time.”
His head ached in cadence to the throbbing in his jaw. He hadn’t eaten anything for hours, and he was feeling that Heaven fell short of Naomi’s rhapsodizing about warm, friendly people. Forcing his split lips into a smile, he said, “Yes, ma’am. Fortunately, a woman from town stopped to help me. I didn’t get her name.”
She shrugged. “Payment’s in full. Up front. Cash preferred.”
Naomi had warned him of Lynette’s affection for cash. No plastic card was accepted, but as he pulled out his wallet, he noted the rest of the office asserted a predilection for plastic. On the counter, plastic—not silk—daffodils leaned out of a hot pink plastic vase with seashells glued on it. The bead curtain was plastic. Plastic covered the lampshade by the cash register. He shifted his feet, heard a crackle. Plastic runner.
After opening his wallet and removing the cash, he glanced down at the registration card she slid in front of him.
“Fill it out completely—including home address. I’ll need your license plate number, too, in case you go sneaking off with my towels.” She looked out the side window. “Where’s your car?” Her eyes narrowed again.
“It’ll be towed in.” He focused on the card. Home address. There it was again. Home. By habit, he put down the address of the pyrotechnic corporation with whom he contracted. He was rarely at the condo he rented with a pilot.
She took the completed card Sparks offered her. “Doug?”
“I go by Sparks.”
A twinkle at last thawed the frosty, faded eyes.
“Bet there’s a story there.” Her tone returned to business. “The town’s got us a drought going on, so we change the towels and sheets twice a week ’stead of every day.”
He nodded. A quick survey out the window showed no on-site restaurant. “No restaurant?”
Turning away from him with the card in her hand, Lynette slid it into a pocket of a numbered canvas wall hanging. “No need for me to monopolize making money. Dew Drop Inn Café’s over there. Place for those of us over thirty and tourists who want local color.” She gestured behind him; Sparks followed. Across the street sat a cinder block building with wide glass windows and a prominent sign announcing a “Squat and Gobble Special” of eggs, biscuits, cream sausage gravy and hash browns. No lights on and a closed sign on the front door. His stomach rumbled.
Lynette peered at him. “Nothing’s open this late... Tomorrow, start of Memorial Day weekend, you can also go to the Dairy Delite at the other edge of town or Angel Wings BBQ here on Main.” She leaned her forearms on the counter. With money in hand, her tone of voice became positively chatty. “So you’re here to bail out Naomi?”
“You must be thinking of somebody else.” He dredged up a smile, wincing at the sting. Everything he owned ached. Longing for bed, he added quickly, “I’m only here to design the Fourth of July Jamboree fireworks. Technicians come from Evanston to set up the actual display. Pretty much, I’m on vacation.” Before he opened the door to leave, he remembered. “I’ll need directions to her office, though.”
“Won’t do you any good. Naomi’s had another stroke.” Lynette’s watery gray eyes scanned him. “We’re waiting for poor little Emma to save us.”
He nodded, and moments later, as he stood in the doorway of room number twenty-seven, Lynette’s departing statement lingered. Poor little Emma must be Naomi’s hapless assistant. Did this mean working for Naomi would be...difficult?
Holding the handles of his two suitcases, he surveyed the room with no relief found from a gathering sense of gloom or his aching muscles. The two full-size beds in front of him, one with a distinct hollow in the middle and both draped with red and saffron zigzag bedspreads, shouted 1970s, as did the crimson velvet paisleys raised on the gold wallpaper. He spied a rotary desk phone on the nightstand. At least there was a phone.
Walking over faded yellow shag carpet, he picked up the receiver to call the rental company. No dial tone. So that hazel-eyed angel girl had already known the secret. Hence her smile, the smile he wanted to remember and see again.
Reminiscing about the four-star hotels he’d enjoyed in Chicago, DC, Paris and Tokyo, he rotated his shoulders. Hadn’t he wanted a break from the globetrotting for a touch of hometown America?
He chose the least concave bed and plopped his suitcases on the other. The bed dropped a couple inches lower. He shrugged. “Best to look on the bright side.” Mother Egan, a fond memory from growing up at the orphanage, had had a million such sayings; every now and then one popped out of his mouth.
Sleep was his next order of business. Once he’d slept, his head would stop banging and his bones would settle back into place. After he met this unfortunate Emma, he’d explore his summer hometown.
Forty-six glorious days of vacation.
CHAPTER FOUR
EMMA PEERED INTO her grandmother’s hospital room where monitors glowed and beeped. Chet sat next to the narrow bed, his arms folded on the railing, head pillowed on them. Sweet Chet. The only person in Heaven who wasn’t afraid of her grandmother, other than Emma’s childhood friend Zoo. Emma stepped forward.
Nomi looked old. Her face, usually bright with vigor or pique, hung sallow. So many machines connected, like when Grumpa was here. So still. Had she—? Nomi moved her right leg slightly under the sheet and blanket.
Letting out the breath Emma didn’t know she’d been holding, she moved over to Chet and touched him on the arm. He jerked, then straightened.
“E?” Worry creased his wrinkles into gullies while his remaining white hair stuck up at every angle. She managed to lift her lips into a semblance of a smile as he gripped her hand. “Thank the good Lord you’re finally here.” No judgment sharpened his words, merely relief. If Nomi had said the same thing, it would have been clear that Emma had taken too long and someone else had had to shoulder her share of the burden.
Nodding toward her grandmother, Emma returned Chet’s squeeze. “How is she?”
“I’m scared, E.” He related the few details he knew: she fell, someone—nobody knew who—called the paramedics, and they brought her to Regional. She was stable. “I’ll leave you alone with her and wait outside.”
Her grandmother stirred. Picking up Nomi’s hand, Emma held it as Nomi lay unresponsive. “Tomorrow. I’ll see you tomorrow,” she whispered.
Nomi’s lids rose slowly. “Trr-ouble,” she whispered through dry lips. Emma reached for a plastic glass with a flexible straw. Her grandmother sipped with shallow swallows.
“Yes,” Emma whispered back, a tear sneaking out of her eye. “It’s trouble, but you’ll be fine. You always are.”
“Sparks. Sparks.” Naomi’s head jerked against the pillow.
Had there been a fire the night of the stroke? Emma’s eyebrows slammed together.
“Take care of...trouble...” Her grandmother’s attempt at speaking alarmed the monitors. Emma stroked Nomi’s arm. Her grandmother would survive trouble. A plan of action for every crisis.
At Emma’s touch, she quieted and appeared to fall asleep.
After watching her grandmother to make sure her sleep was peaceful, Emma joined Chet in the hall. They walked silently through the hospital out toward the parking lot.
As long as there were memories, Nomi and Grumpa were in them. When a fireman came to school in second grade, some kid had asked her if her smoke jumper daddy had been a hero. She wasn’t sure, so she asked her grandmother. Nomi had hesitated, her hands stilling on the fridge door. She’d just returned from her office where she served as mayor and was pulling leftovers out for dinner.
“He did what he felt he had to do,” she’d answered, then she’d told Emma to go set the table. Heroes did what they had to do. Emma had decided if you couldn’t have a father, at least you could have a hero father in heaven. The other heaven.
Emma rubbed the vertical line between her brows that matched her grandmother’s. She knew little of her father, other than he’d left to go smoke jumping and had died.
As a child, she’d been told her mother—whoever she was—had had to go away, asking Nomi and Grumpa to take care of her. Grumpa had said that, so it must be true.
Emma had learned a little more as an early teen. Evidently, her mother had been too much of a teenager herself to handle a baby. Despite the fierce love of her grandmother and the gentle care of her Grumpa, a certain emptiness in Emma had never filled, the being left part. Being left had rendered her unable to call the town home. It set a pattern in motion. Temporary relationships only.
After hugging Chet in the hospital’s parking lot, she slid into the Omni and drove to the house where she’d grown up. She pulled the car onto the double-cemented lines of the driveway. Tomorrow she’d find out her grandmother’s details—or rather, checking her watch, later today—and head back to Salt Lake.
Straightening up, with her stomach continuing to grumble as it had in the hospital, Emma resolved to explore her grandmother’s fridge.
Movement next door at Feral Beryl’s drew her glance. Naomi’s archenemy had peeked out the kitchen window above the Berlin Wall, a tall wooden fence between the two properties. More than a property divider, it divided the have-not Beryl Winsome from the have-it-all Chambers. Beryl was a singularly unpleasant woman.
Emma pulled out her suitcases and approached the bungalow. Fatigue dripped down her neck like perspiration, and her suitcases, rolling behind her, weighed a ton. Lilac bushes that were as high as her waist as a child now towered over her five foot something. They glowed in the dark, lighting both sides of the flagstones to the house. Although chokecherry bushes almost past blooming partially blocked her view, the porch swing peeked through.
Back in the day, when Grumpa could get Nomi to “stop doing and come out and just be,” the three of them would sit in silence on the porch. Grumpa and Emma would be on the swing, Nomi sitting on the floor with her head against Grumpa’s knees. Nomi would jump up for something; Grumpa would say in the voice Nomi called his “bank president” tone, “Leave it, Naomi. The child’s more important.” And Nomi would sit down again.
Her grandmother, never quiet for long, would commence talking about how important it was that Emma make good choices. Clearing his throat, Grumpa would interrupt with another story about the fierce Lady Emma, a young girl extraordinaire who fought dragons and won. When his deep voice finished the story, silence would surround them like an old afghan. Until Nomi would make a surprised sound and exclaim, “Raymond, Emma is beyond bedtime!”
“Come along, Miss Beyond Bedtime,” he would say, and carry her off to bed. They would pray, her last sight Grumpa’s silhouette in the doorway. “Remember, I love you a bushel and a peck and a hug around the neck, Lady Emma.”
Smiling now, Emma walked through the open side gate, around the corner of the house and up the back steps. Sure enough, the door was unlocked, as were most houses in Heaven. She was in before she heard a new sound: a low growl and light panting.
CHAPTER FIVE
THE HEADACHE HAD disappeared by the time Sparks awoke later that morning. While orienting himself to yet another new ceiling, he rubbed his neck reflexively. Traveling often left him muddled about which state, which city, even which country he’d landed in. Then, as he stretched his arms over his head, his muscles rushed to remind him, prompting him to recall as well the woman who’d rescued him.
First, there was the immediate intimacy of the little car and how careful she was to keep to her side. Second, her genuine concern for his head, those watchful side glances from the hazel eyes. Where had she been going with such intensity? He groaned again and rolled out of bed.
After a quick shower and shave, he dressed and left his room for the Dew Drop. He needed to get the scoop on Naomi, Emma and the Jamboree deal, and a local diner always had folks in the know. As he stepped off the curb, he winced. Better keep moving today or those muscles would stiffen up.
The pungent mixture of strong coffee and grease filled his nose not unpleasantly as he opened the diner’s glass door and stepped inside. Although Sparks had eaten some great food in great places across the planet, he still preferred American cardiac-zone cooking.
Most of the booths were full, and the counter didn’t have an empty swivel stool. The clatter of plates, silverware and voices rang against the red-wallpapered walls and aluminum wainscoting. A Coca-Cola clock from years past hung over the half circle of counter space.
“Coffee?” A middle-aged woman waved a coffeepot at him as she caught his glance. He shook his head no, Coke being his caffeine of choice, and continued to look around. When he spotted three men in work clothes crammed in a red Naugahyde booth, he turned toward them. They broke off their conversation, which seemed to center around farm equipment. “I’m here for the summer—fireworks guy for the Jamboree.” He gestured to the space next to the one man sitting alone. “Mind if I join you?”
After staring at him as if he’d spoken in a foreign language, the three men nodded, and the one slid over. The server approached. Sparks opened the menu and ordered a Coke and chicken fried steak with mashed and vegetable medley. At eleven o’clock, it was only a bit early for lunch. He’d really slept in.
“You the guy who crashed that rental in the canyon?” A man with a John Deere cap enquired, thick fingers wrapped around a white stoneware mug.
Sparks nodded sheepishly.
“I’m Willard,” said a big bald man who looked as if he was meeting a celebrity. Having a license to blow things up had that effect on some people.
The man extended his hand. Sparks nodded, shaking the proffered paw, then swallowed some of the Coke that had quickly appeared.
“We’ve never had bigger fireworks than what the fire department put on. The rest are illegal...until you cross into Wyoming,” Willard explained, rubbing his head.
“Special license for entertainment purposes. I get them all the time,” Sparks said.
“That’s Mayor Naomi looking out for us—bringing in something that makes more money, knowing what trouble we’re in.” This was the guy with the John Deere cap. Even with his muttered voice, Sparks had caught that his name was Duff and he owned the Feed-N-Seed in town.
“Lynette mentioned an Emma,” Sparks said, leaving out the part about Emma saving the town. “Who’s she?”
Ray, rail thin and appearing older than the other two, leaned back against the booth, lifted his IFA cap and scratched his scalp. Replacing the cap, he pierced Sparks with a look.
“Closest shot we have to pulling our butts out of the fire. She’s Raymond and Naomi’s granddaughter.”
“I don’t know ’bout whether she’d come back,” Willard said. “You know how she and Naomi left things...” he trailed off, looking like a basset that had had his ears stepped on.
“Oh? So why are your butts in the fire?” Sparks asked.
“Money,” the three men chorused.
“She’ll come back.” That was Ray. He spoke with finality, but Sparks noted the look he tossed Duff.
Sparks jiggled the ice in his empty glass, watching for the server, both for a refill and his breakfast. “Town doesn’t look as if there’s a money problem...everything here looks freshly painted, well maintained.” Sparks tapped his fingers—as was his habit—on the table. He wanted to hear the Jamboree was right on track, meaning his money was right on track, meaning his vacation was right on track.
Duff piped up around the hot beef sandwich he was shoveling in his mouth. “We work hard to make the town look good. Too many dried up little Western towns.” He swallowed his mouthful. “Trouble is, we’ve had some winters that ate up funds with snow removal. All that snow still didn’t kill the drought.” A deep drink of coffee followed.
“My money’s on Emma not coming back,” Willard stated flatly. “She’s not been back since—”
“She’ll be back. Emma’s local,” Ray interrupted.
Listening, but not really, Sparks smiled at the server who set down a full plate, plunking another Coke in front of him, as well. Sparks breathed in the aroma of creamy sausage gravy over crispy fried cube steak, lumpy mashed potatoes and a watery pile of vegetables. He picked up his knife and fork. Ignoring the conversation flowing around him, he sliced a piece of meat, ran it through the gravy and slid it into the pile of mashed potatoes. He sighed, the focus on his aches and pains shifted to this gastronomical delight.
Moments later, as he tuned back into the conversation, the three men were now discussing the Jamboree and the cancelled one-and-only volunteer organizational meeting. Naomi’s skills must be better than his to run a Jamboree off one meeting. Then again, most people’s skills in that area were better than his, and now even his dependability had been called into question by his boss. This job had to go well.