There were other fires, of course. There are always other fires. Harold carried a dozen of them in his memory like stones in a pocket, each with its own weight. The warehouse on Fifth Street in 1978, where the roof collapsed twenty seconds after his crew got out, twenty seconds he still counted in his sleep. The rowhouse on Elm in 1985, where he found two children hiding under a bed and carried them both out through a window, one under each arm, while Eleanor, listening to the scanner at home, prayed so hard she bit through her lip. The chemical plant in 1991, where they fought for eleven hours in suits that made them look like astronauts, and Harold's mask failed in the seventh hour, and he kept working for forty minutes on ambient air before anyone noticed, and spent three days in the hospital while Eleanor sat beside his bed and read him the newspaper and pretended not to be furious. Each fire took something. Each fire gave something. Harold never spoke of them as sacrifices. He spoke of them the way a carpenter speaks of a house: this is the work, this is what the work costs, this is what the work is for.
Eleanor, meanwhile, was fighting her own fires, with weapons Harold found both terrifying and admirable. She taught kindergarten for thirty-one years at Maple Hollow Elementary, and she taught it the way Harold fought fires, with total commitment and no patience for nonsense. Her classroom was famous. She had a reading corner with pillows shaped like animals. She had a guinea pig named Professor. She had a rule that every child would be hugged at least once a day, a rule she enforced personally. Parents requested her by name, and the principal learned, early on, not to stand between Eleanor Brennan and something she believed was right for her children. When the district tried to cut the art program, Eleanor did not write a letter. She loaded thirty-five finger paintings into her car, drove to the district office, and laid them out on the conference table in front of the school board, and she said, These are what you're cutting. Look at them. Really look. And she stood there while seven grown adults looked at thirty-five finger paintings, and not one of them could meet her eyes, and the funding was restored unanimously.
The tree incident became neighborhood legend. In 2003, a developer bought the old oak grove at the edge of Maple Hollow, twelve acres of white oaks older than the subdivision itself, and announced plans to clear it for a parking lot serving a proposed shopping center. Eleanor was fifty-nine, with arthritis in her hands and a knee that ached when it rained. She organized the opposition the way she organized everything, with sign-up sheets and phone trees and baked goods. When the bulldozers arrived on a Monday morning, Eleanor was there, sitting at the base of the largest oak with a thermos of coffee and a copy of the town charter, and when the foreman told her she had to move, she said, Young man, I chained myself to this tree in spirit, and if you want me gone you'll have to arrest a grandmother, and the foreman, who had a grandmother himself, called his boss, and the boss called the developer, and the evening news arrived before anyone could decide what to do. The grove was saved. It is a county park now, with a plaque at the entrance that reads, in Eleanor's honor, though she always said the plaque should have read, in honor of everyone who showed up. Harold had stood at the edge of the grove that morning, in his turnout gear, off duty but ready, and when the news cameras panned across the protesters, there he was, big and solid, arms crossed, standing behind his wife's tree. The photograph ran on the front page. Eleanor framed it. It hung in their hallway for twenty years, next to the hallway clock she made him wind every Sunday.
Carol grew up in the middle of all of this, the daughter of a firefighter and a force of nature, and she emerged, to no one's surprise, as a formidable person in her own right. She learned to drive in the Mustang, stalling it seventeen times in the high school parking lot while Eleanor laughed and Harold gripped the dashboard and tried to remember his blood pressure medication. She went to college in Ohio, became a teacher like her mother, then a principal, married a kind man named David who sold insurance and coached Little League, raised two children who called Harold Poppy and Eleanor Nana and who thought the Mustang was the coolest thing in the known universe. Carol worried about her father after Eleanor died, the way daughters do, calling every Sunday and Wednesday, driving down for long weekends, trying to get him to move to Ohio, trying to get him to see a grief counselor, trying to get him to eat something other than toast. Harold deflected all of it with the gentle immovability of a man who had decided how he was going to grieve and saw no reason to discuss it. I'm fine, Carol, he would say. I've got the house. I've got the car. I've got Marty. And Carol would sigh, and let it go, because she knew her father, and she knew that pushing Harold Brennan was like pushing a firehouse: possible in theory, inadvisable in practice.