Burning House Read Free Page A

heard that one before?” Ray says to Andrew. “My grandmother used to say that. Times have changed and times haven’t changed.” He looks away, shakes his head. “I’m profound today, aren’t I? Good it’s coffee and not the drink I wanted.”
    Andrew shifts in the booth, looks at me as if he wants to say something. I lean my head toward him. “What?” I say softly. He starts a rush of whispering.
    “His mother is learning to fall,” I say.
    “What does that mean?” Ray says.
    “In her dance class,” Andrew says. He looks at me again, shy. “Tell him.”
    “I’ve never seen her do it,” I say. “She told me about it—it’s an exercise or something. She’s learning to fall.”
    Ray nods. He looks like a professor being patient with a student who has just reached an obvious conclusion. You know when Ray isn’t interested. He holds his head very straight and looks you right in the eye, as though he is.
    “Does she just go plop?” he says to Andrew.
    “Not really,” Andrew says, more to me than to Ray. “It’s kind of slow.”
    I imagine Ruth bringing her arms in front of her, head bent, an almost penitential position, and then a loosening in the knees, a slow folding downward.
    Ray reaches across the table and pulls my arms away from the front of my body, and his touch startles me so that I jump, almost upsetting my coffee.
    “Let’s take a walk,” he says. “Come on. You’ve got time.”
    He puts two dollars down and pushes the money and the check to the back of the table. I hold Andrew’s parka for him and he backs into it. Ray adjusts it on his shoulders. Ray bends over and feels in Andrew’s pockets.
    “What are you doing?” Andrew says.
    “Sometimes disappearing mittens have a way of reappearing,” Ray says. “I guess not.”
    Ray zips his own green jacket and pulls on his hat. I walk out of the restaurant beside him, and Andrew follows.
    “I’m not going far,” Andrew says. “It’s cold.”
    I clutch the envelope. Ray looks at me and smiles, it’s so obvious that I’m holding the envelope with both hands so I don’t have to hold his hand. He moves in close and puts his hand around my shoulder. No hand-swinging like children—the proper gentleman and the lady out for a stroll. What Ruth has known all along: what will happen can’t be stopped. Aim for grace.

JACKLIGHTING
     

    It is Nicholas’s birthday. Last year he was alive, and we took him presents: a spiral notebook he pulled the pages out of, unable to write but liking the sound of paper tearing; magazines he flipped through, paying no attention to pictures, liking the blur of color. He had a radio, so we could not take a radio. More than the radio, he seemed to like the sound the metal drawer in his bedside table made, sliding open, clicking shut. He would open the drawer and look at the radio. He rarely took it out.
    Nicholas’s brother Spence has made jam. For days the cat has batted grapes around the huge homemade kitchen table; dozens of bloody rags of cheesecloth have been thrown into the trash. There is grape jelly, raspberry jelly, strawberry, quince, and lemon. Last month, a neighbor’s pig escaped and ate Spence’s newly planted fraise des bois plants, but overlooked the strawberry plants close to the house, heavy with berries. After that, Spence captured the pig and called his friend Andy, who came for it with his truck and took the pig to his farm in Warrenton. When Andy got home and lookedin the back of the truck, he found three piglets curled against the pig.
    In this part of Virginia, it is a hundred degrees in August. In June and July you can smell the ground, but in August it has been baked dry; instead of smelling the earth you smell flowers, hot breeze. There is a haze over the Blue Ridge Mountains that stays in the air like cigarette smoke. It is the same color as the eye shadow Spence’s girlfriend, Pammy, wears. The rest of us are sunburned, with pink mosquito bites on our bodies, small