Ashes of Fiery Weather Read Free

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    Norah put her narrowed eyes on her daughter. “Are you going to change?”
    The front door banged. Aidan leaving. Norah shut her eyes.
    â€œNorah?” Cathal said quietly.
    She opened her eyes and said to Cathal, “Can you go with him? I’ll sort this out.”
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    During the Mass, the other wives had gone to Delia’s house and set up. The food was arranged on the dining room table. Plates were out and napkins and plastic utensils. The refrigerator was stocked with Budweiser and Schaefer and Coke and ginger ale. There were stacks of plastic cups. Folding chairs set up. Ashtrays placed about.
    Though she kept the black dress on, Norah discarded the stockings and heels. She would be a bohemian widow. When she thought the word “widow,” it didn’t seem as though Sean had died, only that the alphabet went mad after the first two letters of “wife.”
    Need anything? You’re all right? He was, I know. Thank you, yes. He was.
    I’m fine, thank you. I’m fine, really. Thank you. We’ll be all right, thank you.
    The rituals of the wake and funeral had let Norah hide the rattling of her bones. But now that they were nearing the end of the scripted part, her hands were being taken by fits. The right kept reaching for the left and clasping it tightly enough to hurt. She twisted her wedding ring around and around and kept grasping the gold replica of Sean’s badge that she wore on a slim chain around her neck. Sean had given it to her not long after he’d transferred to the Glory Devlins.
    Norah, near midnight the day of the fire—after Delia had left and she’d made Eileen go with her, which neither of them wanted, but Norah was too tired to care, after the children were finally in bed, and quiet, though maybe crying into their pillows (she refused to look)—she’d remembered Sean’s wedding ring. Firemen weren’t allowed to wear jewelry on the job, and she was forever telling Sean to take off the ring before going to work. It was a silver claddagh, of which hers was a more slender version. But she looked, and it was not on top of his bureau or hers. In a panic, she’d called the firehouse.
Check his locker,
she begged whoever answered the phone.
    It was Frank Burkell who walked over. Norah opened the door before he could knock. Frank uncurled his fist, and after Norah snatched the ring, in the porch light she saw that the crown had left an impression in his palm.
    A hardware store. Combustibles in the basement. An explosion. The floor collapsing. Sean plunging into the basement. But not before shoving the probie behind him to safety.
    Norah could not stop her mind from chasing itself. The shove meant he’d realized it was about to go bad. For at least a few seconds, he’d known. It had taken the men almost a half hour to get to him. The collapse had blocked the only door to the basement. She hadn’t asked if he’d radioed a mayday from the basement as it filled with water from burst pipes.
    An hour before the wake began, she’d added Sean’s wedding ring to the necklace. When she hurried up or down stairs, the Maltese cross and the ring clinked together, a sound almost a musical note but never quite.
    Norah could not sit still. Conversations dove in each ear, swooped up her nose. She walked a circuit from the living room, on the parlor floor, and down the stairs to the garden floor, where the kitchen was. The door opened into the backyard, which abutted the yard of the firehouse, where Delia’s father and maternal grandfather once worked. A ladder leaned against the wall that separated the yards, and as a child, Sean used to climb over it and hang out at the firehouse.
    Sean’s first permanent firehouse had been in Brownsville. During those years, Norah hadn’t worried about him being killed in a fire so much as being shot running into one.
    After three years, Sean had put in for a transfer, and