by Susan Lubner
“It’s not coming from our apartment.” He exhaled loudly as we followed him back inside the Thumbs-Up.
“I bet it’s somebody burning leaves nearby,” Sid said.
“Yup. I think you must be right. Though it’s too windy a day to be doing that.” Dad went back to his work at the counter.
“Let’s go,” Joss said.
Out the window of the front door, in a small slice of sunlight, I saw tiny flakes of snow swirling. The flakes turned randomly, spinning into a crazy dance. “Hey! Sunshine and snow at the same time!” I said. A sure sign of something weird.
“What the…?” My dad’s voice boomed behind me.
“What’s going on?” Sid looked up at the ceiling.
I saw it, too.
The orange glow. Like a sunset sinking between the walls of the diner. But the sun wasn’t setting.
Outside, the snow fell heavier now. It fluttered like confetti in the street. Except, it wasn’t snow.
I yanked open the front door. The string of hanging bells rattled against the wood.
“Holy macaroni,” Dad said over my shoulder. Giant orange flames poked through the top floor windows. Black smoke poured through a hole in the roof. The triple-story apartment house was burning to the ground.
CHAPTER
5
DAD PUNCHED 9-1-1 INTO HIS CELL PHONE BUT hung up fast. Someone had already called for help. Sirens pierced the smoky air and my heart at the same time. Sirens did that to me ever since the accident.
Joss’s face looked like someone had just jumped out of the dark and scared her. My own face probably had the same petrified look. I bolted outside and into the road.
“Elizabeth Sherman!” my father shouted behind me. I made it halfway across the street before he grabbed the back of my jacket. “What on earth…?” he said. I looked back at him, my coat all twisted in his grip.
“Dad! Let go!”
“Where do you think you’re going?” he asked me.
“LET GO! I need to see!”
“You don’t run toward a fire! You can see from here!” He pulled me back to the diner where Joss stood outside, her mouth open like it was hanging on a broken hinge.
“I need to GO!” I tried pulling free. My knees shook so badly I thought I might fall down. “DAD, LET GO… there’s a…”
“What’s with you, Lizzy?” my dad asked. He tipped his head like he was confused. “You can watch from a safe distance,” he said.
Joss suddenly poked me with her elbow. She pointed with her chin, which was back in the right place on her face again. On the other end of the street, the girl, her hood up and most of her face covered with my scarf, stood holding the gray cat and watching the apartment house burn. The sight of her made my knees buckle from relief. I slumped against my dad’s thick shoulder.
“Are you okay?” he asked. He put his arm around me.
“I… I thought… the cat, you know the stray cat?” I asked him. He still looked confused. “I had seen the cat near the house. But I just saw that he’s safe.”
“Ah. Good,” he said. “Can you believe this?”
I shook my head no, but he wasn’t talking to me anymore. My mother had come downstairs from our apartment. She walked toward us in her black cowboy boots, wrapped in the wool blanket from the couch, which barely stretched across her big baby belly.
Her blond hair was darker at the top since she stopped coloring it. It hung just below her shoulders and framed her jaw and neck with a few blunt layers. Her face glowed, partly because of the lights from the trucks. But her skin always had that dewy look to it, even before the pregnancy.
“How did the fire start?” my mother asked calmly. The old Mom would have been freaking out—positive it would spread across the street.
“No idea,” Dad said.
“I’ll be a son of a gun,” Sid said, slowly shaking his head.
My mother rubbed her belly calmly with both hands as if she were telling the baby not to worry. Everything is okay. You’re safe with Momma.
“We saw the fire when it first happened,” I explained. “We were inside the diner and the room turned orange.”
“My goodness,” my mother said. “It turned orange in the apartment, too.”
Smoke spread out from the burning house like a giant black cape. More smoke spewed out and up from the top, as if the building had become one giant chimney. A special for the board popped into my head. The Smoke Stack. A triple-storied sandwich. Smoked salmon, cream cheese, black olives, onion, and tomato layered on three slices of bread instead of two. I felt a twinge guilty that I thought of it at a time like this. So I tucked it away in my brain for later.
Fire trucks arrived, their loud brakes shrieking to a quick stop. An ambulance pulled up, and two women in uniform jumped out. I could hear only bits and pieces of conversations. “Over there!… Stand back!… Got it!”
Sergeant Blumstein and Officer Hodge showed up.
The whole scene was part scary-cool and part something else. I didn’t know what, but it made me feel a little sick.
“It’s sad,” my mother said. “It’s just a house, but it’s still a loss.”
Yes, I thought, that was the something else.
Like the sirens, the red lights brought me back to the night of the car accident, and I felt my throat close. I think they made Mom feel the same way. Because, for just a second, I saw that her dark brown eyes looked even darker. Maybe it was that the daylight was fading, but they definitely had that same blank look they had had back during that awful time. My heart coiled up like a spring, and I looked away from her.
“What should we do about the girl?” Joss asked quietly. She had moved so close I could feel a warm patch on my neck from her breathing.
The girl was still standing in the same spot, holding the cat. She was half turned away from the diner, not looking our way. I stared at the side of her face, willing her to look at me. I wished I could signal that we had food for her.
“She’s ignoring us on purpose,” I whispered back. I figured she was afraid that if we talked to her, someone, Sid or my parents, who were standing just a few feet behind us, would start asking questions. Who is that? Introduce us to your friend, Lizzy!
I jostled the Coke still in my hand. I could tell by the sloshing sound that the ice had started to melt even in the cold air.
“How are we going to get the food to her?” Joss asked me.
“I don’t know, but do you think she accidently started the fire?” I whispered.
“I was wondering that, too.”
“Maybe she was cold and tried to light something in the fireplace,” I said.
The wind blew a strong gust of smoke toward us. Sid coughed. My mom waved her hand in front of her face. “I’m going back inside. Come in, girls,” she said as she started walking toward the apartment. “This can’t be healthy.”
“Yes,” Dad said to us, “go on upstairs.”
“I should go home,” Joss said. I knew her super wide-eyed stare at me was her way of trying to tell me she had an idea. And I knew what it was. She’d leave and get the food to the girl. Except the food was in my bag. And how would I hand all that extra stuff to Joss in front of my dad without it seeming totally weird?
“I’ll walk with you,” I said.
“No, girls, you won’t,” my father said. “It’s getting dark now. And colder.”
I gave Joss a super wide-eyed stare back. What do we do now? Joss and I walked to each other’s houses all the time. She was just a few blocks away. But neither of us was allowed to walk anywhere in the dark.
“I think the street is blocked up there,” Joss said, pointing. She gave me a little smile. I could tell she had an idea, but I didn’t understand what she was planning to do.
Two news crews had arrived. There were reporters and cameras. Abbott Avenue was completely jammed and blocked off at both ends. “Joss, stay for dinner. I’ll drive you home later,” Dad said.
“It’s okay. I ju
st texted my mom. She texted back that my sister’s coming to pick me up.”
Joss’s cell phone lit up with another text. “She’s going to wait for me up on the corner of Juniper and Greenleaf because the road is closed. I can walk the block by myself.” Joss’s eyes went wide again.
“I’ll walk her to the car,” I said, picking up on the plan.
“I’ll go with you both. I don’t want you walking around in the dark.”
“Dad, seriously? It’s a block, and there’s police and firemen everywhere!”
“All right, all right,” Dad said. “I’ll grab some steak tips for dinner and close up. You meet me right back here at the diner. It shouldn’t take you more than a few minutes to scoot to Juniper, so don’t make me worry.”
I hooked my arm through Joss’s, and we rushed into the crowd. I checked to see if Dad was still watching. I hoped not, because we were heading in the wrong direction, toward where we last saw the girl standing with the cat.
“I don’t see her! Where is she?” Joss said at the same time I realized I couldn’t see the girl anymore, either. There were so many people. I lifted my head, but I was too short and the street was too jam-packed.
“Keep looking,” I said. A bright flash of light hit me in the face. It was someone with a camera from one of the news stations. “Maybe she’s gone,” I shouted over the noise. “I bet she was scared she’d get on TV by mistake.”
Joss slapped her hands against her face. “You’re right. I didn’t think of that. I’m sure she doesn’t have a clue that she’s already been on the news.”
“No kidding,” I said. “I feel bad. She’ll be hungry and she’s already thirsty. We should have brought her something before we went to work.” My eyes darted everywhere, hoping to see her behind a tree, a house, a truck. She was nowhere. “Where would she go?”
“If she started that fire, probably as far away as possible,” Joss said.
“You know, if anyone saw us going in and out of that window today, they could blame us for doing something that might have started it.”
“No! We were in there way before,” Joss said.
“True.”
Joss’s phone lit up again. A text from her sister. She held it out for me to read.
Move ur butt I’m not ur chauffer!!!!
“Come on. We better go,” I said. We turned around and headed to Juniper. Right away we could see Elle’s car parked a block ahead.
“See you tomorrow. Don’t forget, Elle is going to Portland and she said we could ride in with her to get some yarn.”
“It’s a plan,” I said. Joss ran toward Elle’s car, and I headed home.
Dad had already shut off the diner lights and was locking the door. A crowd still clogged the street. The apartment house smoldered. Even though the big flames had been put out, the firemen still had their hoses aimed at it. By now, it was five o’clock and dark, and the bright lights from all the trucks gave everything around me—the pavement, the buildings, the faces on all the people—an eerie shine.
“Good. You’re back,” Dad said. “Let’s get home. I’m pooped.” At the bottom of the alley, as soon as we turned into the back parking lot, I saw the gray cat. He was just sitting there, like he was waiting for me.
“Hey!” I said. “Here’s the cat!” He jumped up on the hood of my father’s truck. “You’re a little monkey, aren’t you?” I looked around. Was the girl hiding out nearby?
“Who do we have here? The little fella that had you all worried? He’s trying to get aboard the East Thumb Enterprise,” Dad said. The cat lowered himself into a long stretch, reaching his paws out in front of him, dropping his chest, and arching his bony back. “Don’t scratch the paint.” We both laughed because Dad’s old truck already had a whole bunch of scratches and dings.
The cat jumped down and rubbed up against my legs. “He’s so skinny,” I said. “I need to bring him in, Dad.”
My father knelt down and rubbed the cat’s head. “Well, he’s already used up one of his lives escaping that fire, right? Let’s bring him in. One more furry mouth to feed won’t make or break us, I suppose.”
I dropped my bag by the door and placed the Coke next to it. I scooped the cat up, tucking him under my chin. I could feel his ribs and his bumpy spine as I ran my hand down his back. I hoped the girl wouldn’t mind I was taking him with me. He was hungry, too.
“Where’d the girl go?” I whispered in Smoky’s ear.
Then I followed my father inside, leaving my bag and the drink behind.
CHAPTER
6
“HENRY!” THE BANGLED BRACELETS STACKED ON my mother’s wrists jangled when she lifted the bowl of potato chips away from Dad. He had a mountain of them piled up on his plate.
Dad laughed. “Aww, come on. I like a little crunch with my meals.”
“Chips are not helping solve your heartburn problems. Besides, broccoli is crunchy,” she said, biting into a piece.
“Yeah, Dad. Why do you eat chips with everything?” I shoveled a fork full of my mother’s squash lasagna into my mouth.
“Why not?” he asked. “Life is short.”
“It’s probably shorter, hopefully not, when you eat like you do,” my mother said. “I wish you’d try yoga and a few green vegetables.” She closed her eyes for a second and exhaled.
“Forget about yoga. I can barely pick up a dropped spoon. And green vegetables give me gas. It’s better for everyone if I avoid them,” he said. “You girls, stick with your healthy eating. I like my steak and potato chips.”
“I like steak sometimes, too,” my mother pointed out. “But you can still ease up on the junk food.”
“I’d rather still eat potato chips,” Dad said, crunching.
The red lights from the fire trucks flashed inside the apartment as if there was a disco ball hanging from the ceiling. The atmosphere looked like it was calling for a party, but it felt like a bad memory. I wished it would stop.
“When will they shut those darn lights off?” Mom said as if reading my mind. I couldn’t tell if she was just annoyed by all of the flashing or if it was something more than that, like it was for me.
Dad dropped little bits of steak onto the floor. “Here’s a treat, everyone,” he said. Waffles bounced over to the table, and Fudge and Reuben scrambled over for their share.
Reuben hissed at Waffles. Reuben and Fudge may have looked alike with their brown stripy fur and white paws, but Fudge didn’t have a cranky or skittish bone in his body. And he wasn’t bothered by anything, even a dog five times his size. “Fudge is a simpleton,” Dad liked to say. “Not much going on in that cat’s head, but it serves him well.”
“You’re teaching them all how to beg,” Mom said.
“They’re already experts,” I said.
Reuben hissed at Smoky, too, who had been on the opposite side of the kitchen but was carefully coming over to see what Dad was offering. My parents thought Smoky was a perfect name, and I felt a little guilty taking credit for it.
“Be nice to him, Reuben,” I warned, in a gentle voice.
“He’ll come around,” Mom said. “Remember how long it took him to get used to Waffles?”
When Waffles showed up four years ago, besides only having one eye, his black, curly coat was mangy and full of fleas. We found him sniffing for scraps by the Dumpster. Dad said he actually found us because he knew we wouldn’t turn him away. Mom said it was because Waffles smelled bacon coming from the diner. But it was love at first sight for all of us.
Waffles was a giant poodle, so he could easily rest his chin on the top of the table, which he was doing right now, next to Dad’s elbow.
“That’s not very good manners,” Mom said to Waffles.
“Awwww… you’re just a precocious poodle, aren’t you?” Dad fed him a potato chip. “He loves them. Like his papa.”
“Speaking of potato chips, I was thinking we should add some healthier options to the menu at the diner. All this greasy food isn’t good f
or anybody,” Mom said. She leaned into me. “Don’t tell anyone else that.” She smiled. “Bad for business.”
“And highly illogical,” my father said in his Mr. Spock voice. “People around here like our food, and if it ain’t broke, why fix it?”
“I know they like our food, but we could serve some organic stuff, Henry. People are into that,” Mom said.
“Expensive. I’d pay almost double for those fancy eggs.”
“You could charge more,” I said. Since I was handling the money stuff for Cozy Cat sweaters I felt qualified to point that out.
“Low prices are part of our draw, and if I changed the prices and added items, I’d have to print up new menus. Ka-ching!”
Ka-ching was supposed to be the sound of money flying out of Dad’s cash register.
“Well, maybe we can revisit this when I’m back to working full-time. After the baby…” Mom said, and then stopped. As if just talking about the baby coming might jinx everything.
Babies didn’t come easily for Mom and Dad. After me, it had taken so many years for them to finally almost have another. And then the car accident happened, and that baby didn’t make it, either.
“Maybe,” Mom continued, “we’ll add whole wheat pancakes. It doesn’t cost much to stock whole wheat flour, does it?”
Dad reached for Mom’s hand and squeezed it. “Maybe not.”
After dinner, my parents cleared the table and I rinsed the dishes and put them in the dishwasher. The window above the sink overlooked the back parking lot. We kept a couple of lights on out there that gave me a good view of Dad’s truck and the Dumpster. But there was no sign of the girl. I tried not to imagine her shivering and looking for a place to sleep. The thought of it made me feel like I’d eaten too much.
Dad tied up a bag of garbage and propped it against the wall.
“Yoo-hoo! Knock knock! Y’all want some company? I’ve got something for you to taste-test.” Bibi had come up the stairs and was banging on the apartment door.