Smoke (8 page)

“Pardon?”

“I mean, where’s my wife and what have you done with her? The Mindy I know and love would never be so blasé about our progeny’s potty mouths.”

“Oh, I know. I’m in a funny mood.”

She was in a funny mood. Like her brain was stuck on fast-forward, whirring, whirring, whirring.

“It’s that spin class, I tell you.” Peter took her in his arms and pulled her close. His hands traveled down to her backside and cupped her butt, which did feel, for once, slightly more toned. “You’re always riled up after that class. Not that I mind—”

“PDA alert!” Carrie yelled from the other side of the room, where she was sitting at the kitchen table, doing her math homework. She was still wearing her ballet clothes, tights, a black leotard, and a pink shrug, her corn-colored hair pulled into a perfect bun.

“Now, honey,” Peter said. “You want your parents to love each other, don’t you?”

“Not, like, in front of me.”

“How do you think you were created, huh?”

“Oh, Peter, hush,” Mindy said, but she was laughing.

Peter’s hands, she noticed, hadn’t moved from her backside. Maybe she could put all this energy to use later, after the kids were in bed.

“Angus! Mom and Dad are being disgusting,” Carrie called.

Angus was sitting, zombielike, in front of the kids’ computer, which Mindy still insisted on being in full public view. No private porn searches for her son. Not in her house.

“Oh, grow up, Carrie,” Angus said, his eyes never leaving the screen. “Maybe if you actually kissed one of those guys in your ballet class instead of—”

“Dinner!” Mindy said, right before she landed a smack on Peter’s lips.

CHAPTER 9

How a House Became a Home

Elizabeth

The interview with John Phillips
leaves me worn out. I don’t know if it’s the sadness that seeped from him in a way you could almost touch, or how he sat there, alone on a cot in a room crowded with them ready to take in a townful of people who hadn’t shown up yet. Ready to take in Ben and me if we didn’t have somewhere else to go.

Deputy Clark drops me off at the office, and we part with few words. At my desk, I type up my notes from the fire and the interview with John, making a list of things to follow up on tomorrow: get a copy of the police reports he mentioned, see if any other neighbors were having trouble with kids loitering on their property, try to track down the group of kids who might’ve started a fire that’s still blazing, growing. Up to six hundred acres now, according to the latest alert, with crews coming in from all over and low containment.

I check the weather forecast again and, as Kara said, it’s bad. Starting tomorrow, there’ll be wind and heat and not a drop of moisture in sight for days. I say a small prayer that the weather guys are as off as they normally are, but I’ve noticed they never seem to get it wrong when it counts. That late May snowstorm that ruins Memorial Day weekend, or that torrential rain on the Fourth of July? Those always seem to happen. But the cooler, cloudy day needed after a heat wave? That occurs by fluke—unexpected, almost unbidden.

“Well, folks, we’re not sure what happened exactly, but that beautiful day we predicted just didn’t seem to materialize. Instead, a high ridge of
 . . .
”

And what’s with the singsong voices they deliver the weather in, anyway?

But, yeah, it’s looking bad. No matter which way you shake it.

I close down my computer and text Ben:
Meet me at the house
now?

His answer comes a moment later:
I’m on my way
.

Located in the western foothills of Nelson Peak, our house isn’t something a wildland firefighter and a teacher could have afforded but for Grace and Gordon’s generosity.

We never planned on owing money to them, or to anyone for that matter. It was something we both hated, debt, being in debt, owing things to other people. We had that in common. But our house, well, we both fell in love with it the first time we saw it.

And love makes you do funny things sometimes.

We’d been looking at much smaller places on the valley floor. Small houses, on shady streets, that looked like they hadn’t been properly winterized. I’d go into one of them, and all I could see were the problems: the bathrooms that needed to be redone, the kitchens that required ripping out, not because I was so picky, but because it was a question of basic sanitation. A town where a third of the population is transient is hard on the real estate. And the thought of scrubbing off years’ worth of ski-bum grime defeated me.

But we were near to closing on one of the better-than-the-others houses because we needed somewhere to live—our current place, a rental, was being repo-ed by the bank, and they didn’t want a tenant—when I saw an ad in the
Nelson Daily
. A newly finished A-frame with a view of the mountains, surrounded by large aspens. I could imagine the break they’d bring from the summer heat, and the shimmering gold they’d turn in the fall.

Ben looked skeptical when I showed him the listing, but I could see a light in his eyes. And it was shining out of both of us as we walked around the sun-filled house and breathed in the smell of freshly sawn lumber.

We could have a family here,
I thought.
It’s perfect.

The real estate agent was blathering on about square footage and how it was a hot property market and we’d better scoop up the house while we could. But when I saw the asking price—and we’d better come in at asking, the agent told us—my heart sank.

“We can’t afford this,” I whispered to Ben while we were pretending to check out the pantry off the kitchen.

“I know, but . . . I think there’s a way. If we can both swallow our pride.”

I knew what he meant. Go to his parents, do the one thing we’d promised never to do, which was ask them for anything.

But this house. This house with its picture windows that seem to lay the whole town out at our feet, and the big stone fireplace in the great room that keeps it cheery all winter long, and the evergreens that make the air feel freshly scrubbed even though the day is hot and muggy,
this house
was worth the sacrifice of our principles.

“I can do it if you can,” I said.

We squeezed hands to seal the deal, our wedding bands clinking against one another as if they had sought each other out to make a toast.

Ben is waiting for me on our wraparound porch, sitting in the wood swing we spent one sweaty weekend putting together a few years ago.

We always seem to get into fights when we try a joint home-improvement project, and so we’ve found it easier, over the years, to split up the tasks. I rolled paint on the walls in the winter months, in my haphazard way where it might take a week to get a room done. He’d start and complete a project in a blitz, working almost frenetically to finish the bookshelves that lined one side of the great room, or installing a new dishwasher as soon as the old one broke.

But this swing, this lovers’ swing, was something that took two sets of hands, and so we worked together, and fought, and right before it was done, I sliced my finger on the sharp edge of the packing crate it came in.

“Sit right there,” Ben had said as a red stain bloomed on my hand. “Keep it elevated.”

While he rushed off to find our first-aid kit—
It’s above the sink!
I almost called after him, then bit my tongue—I peeled off my sweaty shirt and wrapped it tightly around my finger. I sat on the swing wearing my taupe-colored bra, holding my throbbing hand to my chest and pushing at the ground with my feet, wondering how I could be so careless.

Ben returned a moment later with the tackle box I’d converted into a first-aid kit. Even though I was the one with the EMT training, he moved efficiently, quickly, finding the right size bandage and antibacterial cream without my having to tell him what to do. He removed my shirt from my finger gently, then wiped the blood away with a stinging cloth. He held my hand with care while he bandaged me up.

“All better now?” he asked, kissing my forehead.

I nodded, and he sat down next to me. I leaned my head against his shoulder and laughed.

“What?”

“At least we didn’t get into a fight.”

He started to laugh too, and we sat there for a while, chuckling and admiring the view.

Ben is not laughing now.

“Where do you want to start?” he asks, all business.

“Maybe we could go room to room and take the easy stuff? Photographs, bills, DVDs. I still have a couple of those plastic containers in the pantry. And the fridge, we should clean out the fridge.”

He nods and stands. He follows me inside, and the smell of smoke seems stronger in here than under the sheltering pines. Already the house feels like it’s been abandoned.

“I’ll take the kitchen,” Ben says. “And I need to get my writing stuff.”

This surprises me. While Ben mostly writes on a laptop these days, he has notebooks full of poems, short stories, and half-finished novels going back to his teens. I’d just assumed he took those with him when we left last night. I would have. But Ben’s writing, or Ben not writing, that’s just one of the things we don’t talk about anymore.

“I thought—”

“What?” he says, with an edge to his voice.

“Nothing, forget it. I’ll get the other stuff.”

He grunts and walks toward the kitchen. I follow him to get a plastic container. The muscles in his neck are taut. Ben is angry, I realize. Not just annoyed, like he might have been this morning or definitely this afternoon, but honest-to-goodness angry. The anger I asked about when we were parked outside his parents’ house, which he denied.

The anger he said he could never feel about me.

But yet, here it is, taking up residence in the house we’ve deserted.

When we get back to Ben’s parents’ house, the backs of our cars filled with plastic containers full of food and memories, it’s thankfully past dinnertime. There is no casual dining in that house, and I don’t think I can stand a whole dinner of keeping up appearances.

Gordon and Grace are on their way out for the evening. Gordon in his dinner jacket, Grace in an ice-blue sheath dress covered in crystals. The symphony is coming to Nelson for the night, an event I’ve often meant to go to but somehow always end up skipping.

Grace eyes the stacks of crates that Ben is building in the entranceway. She wears her thick white hair in a blunt cut, and Ben’s green eyes are the only color in her face.

“Stay as long as you like,” she says, kissing the air near my cheek.

“Thank you. It shouldn’t be too long.”

She nods her head, her eyes full of sympathy, and it’s a good thing they leave then because otherwise I might be crying into her shoulder again. As far as mother figures go, I’m much closer to her than my own mother, who left me with my dad when I was eight after they split up. It’s not as bad as it sounds—I saw her on weekends and holidays, typical “dad days”—but I could make it seem that way if I wanted to without trying too hard.

After they leave, Ben and I go into the kitchen. It’s full of endless white marble counters and dark wood cabinetry, pretty much the opposite of our battered oak cabinets and laminate countertops, but I’d take ours in a heartbeat. Our kitchen the way it used to be, anyway, where we’d build meals together and laugh at the sometimes disastrous results.

Ben pulls food from the Sub-Zero fridge.

“Chicken double-decker?” he asks.

“Please.”

He starts assembling the makings of his famous-in-our-house sandwich: toasted bread, chicken, lettuce, tomato, bacon, mayonnaise, repeat. It’s like two club sandwiches stacked one on top of the other, so big it takes work to get your mouth around, which is part of its appeal. We have never, not once, eaten these sandwiches and not ended up giggling our asses off as we watch each other try to navigate them. It’s a standoff to see who crumbles first. Eventually, you give in to the fact that the only way you can eat the sandwich is by picking it apart with your hands and using a knife and fork.

“How was school today?” I ask.

Ben works at one of the two town high schools. There’s the public one, which is much like the one I attended—large classes, kids from all walks of life, teachers who are underpaid and overworked. And then there’s Ben’s school, a private one that costs forty thousand dollars a year to attend. It’s called Voyages, which always makes me think it should be taking place onboard a ship rather than in the sparkling facility that sprawls over several acres on the far east side of town.

It’s where Ben went and where some of his old friends send their kids now. He hadn’t wanted to teach there—he really would’ve preferred to be in the public school system, or so he used to say—but there wasn’t a job open when he passed his qualifications, and he wanted very much to stay in Nelson, so he gave in. “I’ll teach them to be little liberals when their parents aren’t looking,” he said ruefully when he told me about his decision. “Work on the inside.”

“How was Write Club?” I say now.

“The first rule of Write Club is that you don’t talk about Write Club.”

“Ha.”

“It was fine. Same group of kids, mostly.”

“That Tucker kid and his friends too?”

“Looks like it. Apparently, every budding sociopath likes to share his dark fantasies with his classmates.”

Ben finishes building my sandwich and pushes it across the counter to me.

“Do you think that’s what it is?”

“Who knows? I hate how I have to wonder half the time whether I should be reporting kids to the principal because of the zero-tolerance policy on violence.”

Last year Ben had no choice but to turn one of Tucker’s stories over to the principal because it went into detail about how he wanted to practice cutting up his sister by starting with her ballet outfits. He’d initially been suspended for three days, but when it turned out his sister didn’t even take ballet, he was let back in and the principal (and Ben) had to apologize to the family while Tucker looked on with an evil smirk. The next week, Ben found a cut-up ballet leotard in his staffroom mail cubby, but when they couldn’t prove who’d left it there because the camera feed was down, that had been the end of it.