On the fourteenth day, the day before the tow was scheduled, Harold did something he had not done in nineteen months. He opened the garage and took out the buffer he had not touched since Eleanor was alive, and he spent six hours detailing the Mustang, clay-barring the paint, polishing the chrome, dressing the tires as best he could, cleaning the glass inside and out until it shone. His back screamed. His hands cramped. He did not stop. When he was finished, the car gleamed in the late-afternoon light, the red paint deep and lustrous, the chrome throwing back the sun in bright bars, and it looked, Harold thought, like the day Eleanor drove it home, like 1982 had come back around. Mrs. Abernathy came out onto her porch and called over, Harold, that car looks beautiful, and he tipped an imaginary hat to her, and Pete Dugan walked across the street in his house shoes to look it over, and he whistled low and said, Ellie would love this, Hal, and Harold had to turn away for a minute and pretend to check the tire pressure.
That night, Harold wrote a letter. He wrote it by hand, in his careful block printing, on lined paper from the pad Eleanor had kept by the phone. It was addressed to Diane Kessler and the board, and it said that he had lived in Maple Hollow for forty-four years, that he had paid his dues every quarter without fail, that he had never asked the association for anything, and that he was asking now, not as a supplicant but as a neighbor, for the tow to be called off while he finished the repairs, which were underway. He wrote about Eleanor, briefly, because he could not write about her at length without breaking. He wrote about the firehouse, about the thirty years he had served the community, though he did not say what the community owed him, because Harold Brennan had never believed anyone owed him anything. He sealed the letter in an envelope and drove it to Diane Kessler's house himself, in his pickup, and put it in her mailbox, and the little red flag stood up in the dusk like a warning.
He never received a reply. What he received, at seven o'clock the next morning, was the sound of diesel engines on his street, and he looked out the window and saw the All-Star Recovery tow truck turning the corner, its amber lights already flashing, and behind it the white golf cart of the compliance officer, and behind that a county police cruiser, and Harold's heart began to pound the way it had pounded before every fire, and he put on his good jacket over his pajamas, because it was the only armor he had, and he walked out into the morning to meet them.
Harold Brennan had not set out to be a hero. He had set out, at nineteen, to have a job that meant something, which in 1967, in a working-class town with the draft breathing down every young man's neck, narrowed the options considerably. The fire department was hiring. The pay was steady. The pension, the old-timers said, was gold. Harold took the civil service exam on a rainy Saturday, scored near the top, and reported to the academy that fall, where they shaved his head and taught him to coil hose and climb ladders and, most importantly, to trust the man next to him with his life, a lesson Harold absorbed so completely that it became the architecture of everything he was. He married Eleanor the following summer. He made engine company in eighteen months. By twenty-five he was the youngest ladder operator in the department's history, and by thirty-two he was a lieutenant, and by forty he was Captain Brennan of Engine 4, and the younger firefighters called him Cap behind his back with a reverence usually reserved for ballplayers and priests.
Engine 4 ran out of Station 4 on the east side, a brick firehouse built in 1923 with a brass pole Harold never once slid down, because he said poles were for showing off and stairs were for getting there alive. His crew loved him with the complicated love that firefighters have for officers who are demanding and fair in equal measure. He drilled them mercilessly. He inspected their gear personally. He knew the names of their wives and children and asked after them by name. And he had one rule, stated on every rookie's first day, in the same words, every time: We all go home. Everything else is negotiable. That rule is first. Marty Kowalski, his engineer for twenty-two years, could still recite it verbatim, and did, at Harold's retirement dinner, to a roomful of firefighters who rose to their feet.