Ignited (3 page)

She was about to deal when Stanley said, “Cut.”

She set the deck in front of him. He cut it, and she took it up again and dealt three cards.

“What for?” he asked.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, you find out he cheated her, then what?”

“I save Sunnyvale.”

“And?”

“And I live there in the winter, like always. And you guys come down. Like always.”

“For how long?”

Forever.

That was her answer, but it was too childish to speak out loud. Stanley would be eighty years old soon, if he wasn’t already. There was no such thing as forever.

“I’m not sure,” she said lamely. “It’s home.”

“You know the place is a dump, right?”

“It’s not a dump. It just needs updating.”

Stanley chuckled. “You can update it, but it’ll still be a dump.”

“You guys come back every year. Why would you pay to stay at a dump?”

“Mike always complained.”

“He complained? About what? You live at a campground.”

“You don’t have to tell me that.”

“What do you want, a four-star meal?”

“
I
don’t. But Mike’s been getting brochures from those all-inclusive resort places. I think we’re going to try one in the Bahamas.”

“So you’re not coming back even if I save it?”

“Not this year.”

When she didn’t respond, he added, “We’ll be sorry to miss the company, though. You and Esther and them.”

She tossed her cards down, childish in her disappointment. “No matter what I do, it’s pointless.”

“No, it ain’t.”

“I thought I’d fix it up some. Attract new people, too. I mean, I know it won’t always be exactly the same. I know that. But I want to keep it the same for a while. In Grandma’s memory, you know? I think she’d like that.”

“Hmm.” He pointed at the pile of matchsticks. “Your bet.”

Ashley reluctantly picked up her cards and looked them over—red, black, clubs, diamonds. She tried to breathe. The matches were vibrating. Her leg, jiggling under the table.

“I can’t do this,” she said.

She wasn’t even sure what she meant.

At the fire pit, Michael whooped. Smoke swirled around Roman, whose palms rubbed back and forth on the stick, spinning it. Spinning. He bent sideways, low to the ground, and blew, squinting against the sting.

A flame flickered into being.

Without thinking, she was on her feet. She’d spilled her cards on the table, flipping a few of them faceup. Straining to see. Elated that he’d done it.

Stanley glanced at the fire. Then at her face.

“Thought I taught you to bluff better than that,” he said mildly.

The back of her neck went hot. “We’re not …”

He waved his hand at her.
I don’t want to know
.

She sat back down, and they returned to the game.

She lost. Lost again.

She was running out of matchsticks. And excuses.

“Did you know she’d sold?” she blurted.

He shook his head.

“Did you know she was sick again?”

He lifted his seamed face. “We weren’t that close.”

“I don’t understand it.”

“You should talk to Esther.”

Her grandmother’s other best friend, Esther, lived in Wisconsin. She was Mitzi’s opposite—grandmotherly where Mitzi was sleek and sexy, conservative where Mitzi was permissive. “You think she knows something?”

“If anybody does.”

The fire had grown a foot tall now, and Roman had left off feeding it tinder and started putting in chunks of wood as big as his wrist.

Their eyes met over the flames. She felt his hands on her, his fingers in her hair, his mouth at her breast, drawing up her desire and focusing it to a point.

She felt the impossibility of it.

Some people could breathe fire to life, but she wasn’t one of them.

Focused on the flames again, Roman smiled at something Michael said. In his triumph, he smiled his real smile, easy and bright.

Stanley reached across the table and covered her hand with his. “Susan wasn’t the type to hide things. If she felt like he’d cheated her, she’d have said.”

Ashley looked at his hand, crooked knuckle joints and liver spots, heavy and warm.

When he took it away, she picked up a match from the kitty and scraped it over the rough edge of the concrete tabletop. She watched the flame burn down until heat pinched her fingers, and then she shook it out.

“I have to look, though,” she said. “Just in case.”

CHAPTER THREE

When it got to be 5:30 and Ashley still hadn’t come out of the trailer—much less asked him what he wanted for dinner, shopped for the groceries she’d need to make the dinner, or
cooked
the dinner—Roman knocked on the door of the Airstream.

“Go away.” A layer of aluminum and plastic muffled her voice, but he could hear the wrongness in it.

The fire popped and crackled. It was 80 degrees out and starting to cool off. The sky was clear, the breeze just right.

Ashley Bowman was sitting in a trailer with the door closed and her new drapes blocking out all the light.

“Open up.”

“I’ll come out in a while.”

“What are you doing?”

“Just going through these boxes.”

“It doesn’t take all afternoon to go through a dozen boxes.”

A soft scraping sound, and then she flung the door open, nearly catching him in the nose. “It does when you take a lot of breaks to sob uncontrollably, okay?” Her eyes looked too small in her puffy face. “I’ll be fine tomorrow. I just need you to leave me alone for a while.”

Leave her alone. Exactly what he should do.

If Heberto were here, he would be working. Cut off from cell access, he’d head for a bar in the closest town, tune the wall-mounted TV to CNN, and commandeer a landline and the fax machine.

If Heberto were here, he would tell Roman that what Ashley Bowman did alone in that trailer for hours on end was none of Roman’s goddamn business. Not unless he could figure out a way to turn it to his advantage, make a profit on it.

And if Roman protested that he was worried about Ashley—that he’d been trying for two hours but he couldn’t
stop
worrying about her—Heberto would start talking about Cuba. Because everything was about Cuba for Heberto.

“The true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love.” Che said that. Che was full of shit.
Heberto would clip the word short, tongue to palate.
Sheet. Fool of it
.

The Revolution put my brother up against a wall and shot him on television. You think the man who pulled the trigger had his heart full of love?

Roman had heard a dozen variants of the speech. Heberto took it out, polished it. It always had the same moral.

It’s dog eat dog in this world.

Roman looked at his shoe. Somehow, it was on the step. He’d weighted his front foot, ready to push upward.

The thing was, he wasn’t sure he believed Heberto.

He wasn’t sure Cuba had anything much to do with him and Ashley.

So he climbed the next step, crowding her. With a sigh, she stepped back to let him inside.

The trailer looked like a bomb had gone off. He picked up a foam hat in the shape of a Viking helmet, complete with horns, and accidentally dislodged some Mardi Gras beads into the sink.

“There’s crap everywhere.”

“Aren’t you observant?”

“You don’t have to be snippy.”

“I do, actually. It’s my best hope of getting you to go away.”

“You think I’m afraid of a snippy woman?”

He’d have to introduce her to Carmen sometime. Wouldn’t that be a hoot.

“What
are
you afraid of?” she asked.

I’m afraid of the way it felt to bring that fire to life. This intense, percolating pressure that must have been hiding behind my heart, beneath my lungs—and suddenly the fire started, and it wanted out. It felt so fucking good to let it out. I think it might have been hope, and it was bigger than anything I’ve let myself feel in a long, long time.

I’m afraid of the fact that I made the fire because you asked me to, and of how badly I needed to see your face as soon as I’d made it happen.

But mostly I’m afraid because I’m here, now. With you. And I don’t know what’s going on, but I know it’s not what’s supposed to be going on.

I’m afraid because I can’t feel “supposed to” anymore.

“You’re going to get heatstroke in here with the door closed,” he said. “What’s the matter?”

“My grandma is dead.”

“She’s been dead a few weeks. You’re supposed to be making me dinner.”

That brought her head up. Good. Annoyed was better than sad. “It’s really not any of your business.”

“Something in the boxes?”

He knelt down. Beneath the flaps of the nearest of them, he found a stuffed toy hot dog, a cheap plastic back-scratcher that said “Dollywood” on the handle, and a pair of hot pink glittery shoes with metal fastened to the bottoms.

“Are these tap shoes?”

“Yes.”

“Susan’s?”

“Mine.”

The trailer was too dark, lit only by a dim bulb over the stove and the light leaking in around the edges of the curtains. It was stifling, stuffy, dusty-smelling. But he didn’t have any trouble making out the expression on Ashley’s face.

Utter devastation.

“What is all this stuff?”

“Souvenirs.” She sniffed and pushed at her nose with the back of her hand. “From our trips.” The last word came out pinched, as though her throat had tried to close off around it.

“Come on. Enough with the crying.”

She wiped at her eye with the edge of her finger. “I’m not crying. I’m doing great.” Her voice wobbled. “I just want you to
go awuh-waaay
.” The last word transformed into a sob, and she turned away from him and folded her forearms on the trailer wall and made the most horrible, ugly, naked sounds.

He remembered how, in the truck, when she’d cried and sang to him, it had been like being stabbed with her sorrow.

This should have been worse. In a way, it
was
worse. She was crying a lot harder now, and he badly wanted her to stop.

There was a difference, though. This time, he didn’t feel like she was doing this
to
him. Ashley didn’t expect anything from him. She wasn’t crying because she wanted his help or his attention, or because she wanted to annoy him.

She was crying because she felt terrible, and the impulse to leave her here to fend for herself came and went in an instant, barely registering.

Talk to her. Touch her. Help her.

Ironic that he should meet his worst fear here, in the trailer she’d insisted they bring along: that he might have no choice left to him but this. That Ashley might push him into some place he couldn’t get back from.

And that he would go willingly, full of doomed hope.

He studied the shape of her back, the fall of her hair, the outline of her bra strap against her yellow T-shirt. He wasn’t ready to touch her. He didn’t even know what to say.

He took a deep breath, thinking,
It starts with a question. Any question.

“What’s the story with the tap shoes?”

It took her a long time to pull herself together enough to answer. Even then, the words came out broken. “I wore those for, like, six wuh-weeks one summer. I’d got it into my head that I wanted taps on my shoes. I told Grandma, and she brought those pink shoes home one day. I tapped everywhere. All of the time.”

Ashley in pink sparkly shoes, her skinny legs even skinnier back then. Her face not quite finished yet. Dancing around the pool, into the office, toward the beach.

“It must have driven her absolutely insane, but she never said. She let me do that kind of stuff, if I wanted to. She wasn’t big on limits.”

“What about that stuffed hot dog?”

“That’s from when we camped overnight next to the Oscar Meyer Wienermobile once.”

“The Wienermobile camps?”

“Not normally, but they had a flat or something. Engine trouble? I can’t remember. It was just a freak coincidence. The driver—his name was Steve—was super-nice. Grandma made him dinner, and he gave us the little waving wiener to remember him by.”

She turned around, smiling a little, and the tension at his temples eased.

“Grandma made wiener jokes at him all night. I think he was about ready to throttle her by the time he left in the morning.”

That was the Susan Bowman he remembered. Not big on limits. Or tact. Friendly, but in an undiscriminating sort of way. She’d called Roman “hon” and acted like she was excited to see him when he picked up the rent check, even though she was the one who’d made it a condition of accepting the offer that he show up in person once a quarter to retrieve the rent.

She was the one who’d insisted that he not speak to Ashley about the terms of the sale, then or now.

“I’m guessing the beads are from Mardi Gras.”

“No. They’re from Fardi Gras.”

“Do I want to know?”

“It’s not as bad as it sounds. There’s a bunch of RV people who meet up in southern Oregon every year and work on this miniature train track that’s open to the public, but only in the summer. A group of them call themselves the Old Farts, and they throw Fardi Gras in September, right before it gets cold enough to make them scatter for warmer climates. We celebrated it with them one year. It was really fun. Fardi Gras is light on the carnival floats and ‘Show us your tits,’ heavy on the drinking and high-speed miniature train rides.”

“I hope you wore a helmet.”

“No.” A memory made her smile faintly. “I fell off in the tunnel. Nearly got run over by the next train that came along.”

He looked at the piles along the walls. Box after box of memories, packaged up and preserved. Ashley’s version of merit badges and handbooks, dusty compasses and campfire cookware.

“It’s nice,” she said with a sniffle and a brave smile. “To have all these things to remind me of our stories. It just makes me sad to remember. Sometimes it’s good to be sad, you know?”

She tried to sell it, she really did. But her eyes had ghosts in them, and he recognized those ghosts. He’d curled up under a tarp in the woods, trying to keep his gaze on the stars to drown out their howling.