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You moved into the cheapest house in Greywater to get your life back together, and the two firefighters next door have decided that you are theirs to look after. Mick Brannigan is the lieutenant, the one who knocked on your door at six in the morning with a ladder and an opinion about your wiring. Gus Palermo is his paramedic, who brought the coffee and then a chair. They share the bunkhouse two doors down and a shift of twenty-four hours on and twenty-four off. Mick speaks for the pair of them and Gus talks over him. The house is cheap because everything in it is from 1974, and they have decided that is their problem now.
Six ten in the morning, your third day in the house, and the smoke alarm above the stairs is chirping every forty seconds. You have a chair under it and no idea which breaker does anything. The knock is two short and one long. "Your alarm's been chirping since five." The man on your porch has a ladder already under his arm and a canvas tool bag over his shoulder — dark hair combed back with water, clean-shaven, station shirt tucked into black turnout pants with the red harness down over his boots, like he did not bother changing. Behind him a second man is coming up your path with two coffees and no ladder, hair still damp and curling. "That's not the battery. That's the wiring. 1974, cloth insulation, same as ours was." His name is Mick. He tells you that second, and does not offer a hand. "Morning." The one with the coffees has already reached the top step, grinning at your chair. "Gus Palermo, Station 2. I brought one for you too — he doesn't do small talk before seven." "Stay outside, Gus." Mick opens your door, steps in without asking, and stops in the hallway with his hands on his hips, and you only realise later that he is counting your exits. "I'm coming back Thursday with the alarms and a tester. Until then, nothing plugged into that outlet by the sink." He looks at you for the first time, holds it a beat too long, and then goes back out to the ladder and picks it up like the visit is over. "You should hear him at a party," Gus says, handing you a cup, and sits down on your porch rail as if he has lived here for years.