Burning House Read Free Page B

scratches from gathering raspberries. Pammy has just arrived from Washington. She is winter-pale. Since she is ten years younger than the rest of us, a few scratches wouldn’t make her look as if she belonged, anyway. She is in medical school at Georgetown, and her summer-school classes have just ended. She arrived with leather sandals that squeak. She is exhausted and sleeps half the day, upstairs, with the fan blowing on her. All weekend the big fan has blown on Spence, in the kitchen, boiling and bottling his jams and jellies. The small fan blows on Pammy.
    Wynn and I have come from New York. Every year we borrow his mother’s car and drive from Hoboken to Virginia. We used to take the trip to spend the week of Nicholas’s birthday with him. Now we come to see Spence, who lives alone in the house. He is making jam early, so we can take jars back with us. He stays in the kitchen because he is depressed and does not really want to talk to us. He scolds the cat, curses when something goes wrong.
    Wynn is in love. The girl he loves is twenty, or twenty-one. Twenty-two. When he told me (top down on the car, talking into the wind), I couldn’t understand half of what he was saying. There were enough facts to daze me; she had a name, she was one of his students, she had canceled her trip to Rome this summer. The day he told me about her, he brought it up twice; first in the car, later in Spence’s kitchen. “That was
not
my mother calling the other night to say she got the car tuned,”Wynn said, smashing his glass on the kitchen counter. I lifted his hand off the large shard of glass, touching his fingers as gently as I’d touch a cactus. When I steadied myself on the counter, a chip of glass nicked my thumb. The pain shot through my body and pulsed in my ribs. Wynn examined my hands; I examined his. A dust of fine glass coated our hands, gently touching, late at night, as we looked out the window at the moon shining on Spence’s lemon tree with its one lemon, too heavy to be growing on the slender branch. A jar of Lipton iced tea was next to the tub the lemon tree grew out of—a joke, put there by Wynn, to encourage it to bear more fruit.
    Wynn is standing in the field across from the house, pacing, head down, the bored little boy grown up.
    “When wasn’t he foolish?” Spence says, walking through the living room. “What kind of sense does it make to turn against him now for being a fool?”
    “He calls it mid-life crisis, Spence, and he’s going to be thirty-two in September.”
    “I know when his birthday is. You hint like this every year. Last year at the end of August you dropped it into conversation that the two of you were doing something or other to celebrate
his birthday
.”
    “We went to one of those places where a machine shoots baseballs at you. His birthday present was ten dollars’ worth of balls pitched at him. I gave him a Red Sox cap. He lost it the same day.”
    “How did he lose it?”
    “We came out of a restaurant and a Doberman was tied by its leash to a stop sign, barking like mad—a very menacing dog. He tossed the cap, and it landed on the dog’s head. It was funny until he wanted to get it back, and he couldn’t go near it.”
    “He’s one in a million. He deserves to have his birthdayremembered. Call me later in the month and remind me.” Spence goes to the foot of the stairs. “Pammy,” he calls.
    “Come up and kill something for me,” she says. The bed creaks, “Come kill a wasp on the bedpost. I hate to kill them, I hate the way they crunch.”
    He walks back to the living room and gets a newspaper and rolls it into a tight tube, slaps it against the palm of his hand.
    Wynn, in the field, is swinging a broken branch, batting hickory nuts and squinting into the sun.
    Nicholas lived for almost a year, brain-damaged, before he died. Even before the accident, he liked the way things felt. He always watched shadows. He was the man looking to the side in Cartier-Bresson’s