Smoke

by Catherine McKenzie

  She just wasn’t.

  Besides, if Kate didn’t care, why should she?

  Mindy bought the chicken she was going to serve for dinner at her last stop, because she’d seen enough warnings about chicken and how you needed to make sure to get it right home and into the fridge. And she’d cook it properly this time, with no pink juices flowing out of it. She was ashamed to admit that despite years of effort, she still hadn’t perfected cooking a chicken. It was such a basic thing—she thought it should be, anyway—and the fact that she was often hurrying it back to the oven after Peter’s carving knife had revealed that, once again, it wasn’t cooked through, was an embarrassment.

  But it was Peter’s favorite, roast chicken with spices on top and a lemon inside, served with garlic rosemary potatoes and a tossed salad, and she liked doing things to make Peter happy. Even after all these years, she made sure that Angus and Carrie didn’t completely divert her attention from the person, the reason, she was living this life in the first place.

  Angus. She had barely thought about him all day, she realized with a start. For once, the focus of her worry had been pulled away from her sixteen-year-old son. She’d spent so much time fretting about Angus this year, a constant slice of pain, like a deep paper cut, that his absence from her thoughts brought a kind of sting too. Because something was off about Angus, though she didn’t know what.

  It hadn’t been any one thing, just a series of small incidents. He wasn’t off in the way Carrie had been, not in need of medical attention. And not in the building-bombs-in-the-basement kind of way (please, God, no). He’d simply moved out of her orbit and into a place she couldn’t quite understand. Was it depression like her brother suffered from? Was he struggling with his sexuality? Was he being bullied at school? No matter how many times she’d asked and poked and even snooped, she couldn’t figure out what it was.

  Only that there was something.

  Take this morning. Mindy had a feeling he’d been sneaking out at night, going off to smoke pot or whatever kids were smoking these days, and the way his clothes were strewn on the floor, that lingering scent, his complete lethargy, all seemed to confirm it. But as hard as she and Peter tried, they could never catch him. Room searches came up empty. The alarm on the house was never disabled. And teenagers like to sleep a lot and experiment and . . .

  So, so, so.

  Peter always said she shouldn’t worry so much, though she knew he was concerned too. He kept trying to get Angus to do the things they used to do together: throwing a ball around, going for long bike rides, rock climbing. But Angus wasn’t interested in those pastimes anymore. Not in doing them with his dad, anyway. And Peter’s quickly hidden hurt broke Mindy’s heart each time she saw it.

  At least Carrie seemed to be skimming on top of whatever was dragging her brother under. As if being born with a hole in her heart had given her extra buoyancy. That might be a problem later on, Mindy knew, but for now it seemed to keep her safe from the worst of what many of her friends’ teenage girls were going through.

  But Angus. They really did have to do something about him. Soon.

  Mindy’s mind skipped to how strange it had been to see Elizabeth at the elementary school, even if it was only a glimpse across the room. That’s all she’d had of her since The Falling Out. And what was she doing talking to John Phillips? Mindy guessed it was about the fire, but it felt odd to see two people who had dominated her thoughts for completely different reasons talking together.

  Was it the emotional loss she felt when she and Elizabeth stopped speaking that made her suddenly attuned to Angus? She wondered about that, knowing that when she was down she tended to amplify other people’s feelings. As if she was a magnifier of other people’s anguish. And that probably explained her obsession with John Phillips too. At least this time, it was going to lead to something good.

  As she pulled into her driveway, Mindy resolved to put these thoughts of her head. And it worked, after a fashion. Peter arrived home while she was checking the chicken for the eighth time, using the meat thermometer he got her, not for her birthday or their anniversary or anything crass like that, but just because he knew she stressed about it and he wanted to help in the small way he could.

  “You should just set that and forget it,” he said. He was wearing one of the suits he’d bought when he got his promotion at the bank, a dark-blue one, with a white dress shirt and a striped tie the kids gave him for Christmas. His sandy hair was still thick, but it was starting to contain shots of gray, particularly where it met his neck.

  “Oh, sure, Ron Popeil, that’s easy for you to say.”

  He held up his hands in mock surrender. He had long, tapered fingers that went with his six-foot-four height. “I know you don’t think highly of sales,” he said. “But Ron Popeil? Sheesh. That’s low.”

  Before Peter started at the bank, he worked in the sales department of the hospital. As Mindy had explained to him more than once, she didn’t have a problem with selling per se. It was the idea of selling medical services, that patients were treated as sales units, something to measured, counted, budgeted for that disturbed her. Not that working at the bank put him in a better moral position. Certainly not when the houses of family after family were being repossessed. Problems Kate and the Coffee Boosters never had to face, or even really understood.

  “Who says I don’t think highly of sales? Plus, Popeil made a shit-ton of money. I could get behind that,” Mindy said.

  “Don’t let the kids hear you talk like that.”

  “I’m sure they say a lot worse out of our hearing.”

  He cocked his head to the side. “Hello, who do we have here?”

  “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.

  Gr
ace 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.