Free Summer of Fire by Linda Jacobs

soften, but he caught his boot toe in the bar’s brass foot rail and lost his balance. Blind anger that she knew was irrational turned her back toward Deering with a tart, “Someday when you’re sober you can thank me properly.”
     

 
    CHAPTER FIVE
     
    July 27
     

     

     
    The next morning Clare found it hard to believe there could be any threat to this pristine forest. She rode in a troop carrier with ten other firefighters on their way to divert the North Fork from Old Faithful. Almost everyone had his or her head down trying to catch a last few minutes of sleep despite the hard bench.
    Although the rising sun angled through the trees on the small forest track, its warmth did not reach beneath the truck’s canvas tarp. In Houston, the July temperature and humidity had both hovered near one hundred.
    Before leaving, she’d visited her mother. They had sat in Constance’s back yard in suburban Bellaire, ignoring the glass-walled office building that towered over the squat, one-story bungalow. The roar of traffic on Loop 610 formed a constant stream of white noise.
    Pouring lemonade from a sweating pitcher, Constance said, “Are you sure about this Wyoming, dear? You’re still suffering over your . . . friend.” Her arch pause suggested Frank might have been more than a co-worker.
    That was ridiculous. Frank had treated Clare like the big brother she’d never had, being an only child. Without bothering to correct her mother, she said, “That’s precisely the point. I need a change and my job will be waiting when I come back.”
    She didn’t say that one more night in Houston, where nightmares wakened her with almost hourly regularity, was more than she could stand.
    “But, dear, Devon is at a delicate age.” A stranger might believe that Constance, with her wide dark eyes and innocent delivery, was being sweet. Clare knew better. “Mother,” she warned, “one of the A & M trainers called a friend in fire command at Yellowstone. Garrett Anderson is expecting me.”
    “Of course, dear, but Devon . . .” Constance pushed back her silver hair where it had fallen over her forehead.
    Clare sipped her mother’s perfect lemonade deliberately. “Taking care of Devon is just an excuse. She could stay with you, but you haven’t been willing to have her overnight since she set her mattress on fire.”
    “Can’t you teach her safety? And you a firefighter.” Constance’s tone said she regarded her daughter’s profession as no better than ditch digger.
    Clare busied herself selecting a fat oatmeal cookie from the symmetrical arrangement on a platter.
    “She still smokes, you know.” Constance lowered her voice as though Devon could overhear. “I smell it on her.”
    “A lot of the other kids smoke. She gets it on her clothes from being around them.” Clare defended Devon even though she knew her daughter probably did smoke, and lied about it.
    “I hope you’re right about her being okay at Jay’s while you’re gone. Her visits there are usually shorter, and you know that fish and family . . .”
    “Stink after three days.” She didn’t need to check her watch to know that she and Constance had exceeded the three hours they usually required. “Devon needs a relationship with her father,” she parroted, from years of repeating the mantra.
    Her mother’s mouth made a line. “You ask me, you should have sole custody, after he . . .”
    Clare had emphatically not asked, but every time Devon left for visitation, she stifled the same thought. “You know that in family law court, you get all the justice you can afford.”
    Beaten back on the new front, Constance returned to the West. “This Wyoming . . .” She gave another of her signature pauses and smoothed the skirt of her yellow-flowered house-dress. “You know they have bears up there.”
    “Yes, Mother.”
    “I’m serious.” Constance’s hands fluttered, a sure sign that she had found something to worry about. Her vigilance was