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An apartment
fire.

And what if he moved on the
way Denise has? What if he were
okay
?

If Jake dies and, like
Denise, I end up moving on, what will that mean?

“You just do what you do,”
she says and takes a deep breath. “Anyway. Do you like the
fish?”

“Fuck the fish.”

I am about to apologize—I
hadn’t expected to say that—but I don’t, because Denise goes on to
tell a story about a girl she knows, a friend of a friend, who died
in a car accident two weeks after her husband left for
Iraq.

“You never think it will
happen that way,” she says, shaking her head. “He gets a month
home, and then he has to go back.”

Would a month be enough?
Could Jake go back to work after a month? Pity for the girl’s
husband turns into pity for Jake when I remember the fire, that it
could have happened to me, to us. That I might have actually
killed
myself. I might
have killed the neighbor whose newspapers I stole, killed Paula and
Safia and their cats and Chancey, all of us choking and melting and
clawing at the burning walls.

“I think it tastes a lot
like regular steak,” she says. “Don’t you?”

I look around at Denise’s
walls, white, cool, and not burning, and think of my own, gray but
sound. And Paul and Safia and the red-haired girl are alive. I’m
alive. Chancey was there this morning to pull at my toe. But it
could have happened. Everything else aside, so much bad could have
happened and didn’t.

Did I even say that? About
fucking the fish?

I laugh. And I tell her I
don’t usually like fish. “But this is good.” I tap it with the tip
of my knife and then get up for a paper towel—

“Want one?”

“Please.”

—and notice a thick stack of
collapsed moving boxes wedged between her refrigerator and the
counter.

She takes the towel from me
when I sit down and another bite of the fish confirms it is the
most flavorful fish I’ve ever eaten. Between chews, between
swallows, my focus has drifted from myself and the time on the
clock to the things that are missing around her house.

“Moving?”

She nods.

“When?”

“Soon.”

“Where?”

“Home. Not with my parents;
I’m buying a house.”

“Buying? How?” I wonder if
we’ll get a house when he comes home. A small one with yellow
siding and a cheerful face—the way doors and windows can make a
face—and a mailbox with “Lakeland and Sharpe” stenciled on the
side.

She flattens some rice into
a patty, then uses her fork to press a criss-cross pattern into the
top. “Insurance.” She doesn’t look at me.

“How much?”

“I don’t know.” She shrugs.
“About two-fifty.”

“That’s ridiculous. You
don’t even have kids.”

She shrugs again.

“Are you keeping it
all?”

“What else would I do with
it?”

“I don’t know. Give it to
his parents?”

“Right,” she says. “I didn’t
think about that.”

We look at one another
across the table.

“How soon is
‘soon’?”

“It depends on when the
money comes through,” she says.

“What about
Brian?”

But she will not talk about
Brian, so I ask instead for more details on her trip to Virginia
and she answers without mentioning the funeral. I learn that the
temperature was slightly cooler. The grass was very green and the
sky seemed to her to be a different shade of blue from what we have
in Tennessee. (I try to imagine how the sky can be different shades
of blue from state to state.) She tells me the Metro is “so fun,
and so efficient! The rest of the country would truly benefit from
public transportation like that,” and that someone, “the most
beautiful man you’ve ever seen,” helped her onto the platform by
reaching out for her hand. “I would never sleep with someone just
after meeting him, but if he hadn’t disappeared into the Metro, who
knows?” She winks, then says, “You know I’m only
playing.”

“Sure.” I mix some rice with
some fish and blend it with the smallest taste of wine. As Donny’s
friend Judy might say,
heaven
.

“I even bought a hotdog from
a street vendor near the Mall,” she says. “I asked for
everything—ketchup, mustard, sauerkraut, onions. He called it ‘the
works.’ Then I added chili. Everything. Have you ever had a hotdog
from a city vendor?”

“No.”

“It was awful.” She laughs.
“The worst hotdog I ever had. But I had to eat the whole thing. You
know?”

I don’t. “No,” I say. I
drink more wine and the nausea builds. Damn it.

“Anyway,” she says.
“Virginia was beautiful. And there were the most heart-ripping
paintings on display at the Mall, all of them being sold by
veterans. There was one…” Her eyes tear and she wipes them without
hiding. “I forget what it was called. A man in a briefcase leans
forward with his hand against the Wall—you know the Wall?—and on
the other side, in the reflection, are…well. You’d have to see it.
I can’t—you would really have to see it.”

I have no idea what she’s
talking about because I’ve never been to D.C. and haven’t seen the
painting, but I listen, anyway, and sit quiet when she
stops.

“Do you like the wine?” she
says.

“It’s fine.”

“William’s mother knows
wines, and this is her favorite. It’s brisk, I think, and nice and
light.”

I taste it again. Light?
Sure. Brisk? I have another sip, but can’t taste the
briskness.

“I’ve been meaning to ask
you,” she says, “about William’s lighter. Did you ever find
it?”

“I didn’t.”

“You’ll let me know if you
do?”

“Sure.”

“His father gave it to him
on his twenty-first birthday.” She twirls her own lighter in her
fingers like a coin. “William used to smoke. He started at sixteen
and thought he’d hidden it from his father for all those years,
until he unwrapped the lighter. He quit that day.”

“I’ll be on the lookout.” I
say, “Brian was worried when I couldn’t find it.”

She turns in her chair to
open a drawer in the hutch behind her and pulls out a pack of
cigarettes and lights one. She hands one to me and lights it for
me. “He knew how important it was,” she says, leaning to open the
window, the cigarette hanging from her mouth.

“What were you going to do
with it?”

“I wanted his father to have
it.”

“Do you think he would want
it?”

“Probably. Wouldn’t
you?”

He carries a state quarter
in his pocket, the one with St. Louis’s Arch on the back. I gave it
to him one Valentine’s Day because it reminded me of our first
weekend away. A bride and groom had been having their pictures
taken in the downtown square, and we’d sat on the stairs and
watched. Later that night while we waited for pizza to be delivered
to our hotel room, I asked Jake what he thought of the bride’s
dress (I’d thought it frilly). He said, “I don’t remember. I was
watching you.”

That quarter, a simple
twenty-five cents, belongs to him and getting it back would be the
same as—or worse than—having never given it to him.

It was the right decision,
not handing over William’s lighter.

“You have it, don’t you?”
she says.

“Hm?”

“William’s
lighter.”

“What would I want with his
lighter?”

Denise leans back in her
chair and crosses her legs and her arms. “I’m not sure, Mia.
What
do
you want
with it?”

“I don’t have it.” I hold
her stare until I think she believes me.

“Well. If you do find
it—”

“Absolutely,” I
say.

“I’ll give you my parents’
address.” She takes a deep drag from her cigarette, so deep I see
her hide a gag when she flicks off the ash. Her face is contorted
and ugly when she exhales.

For what might be half an
hour we make empty conversation. She asks again about my job hunt
and nods uninterestedly when I tell her I’m on the verge of finding
something.

“Where?” She studies an
acrylic nail.

“The paper,” I say. “They’re
looking for a proofreader.”

“You’d get to use your
degree again.”

I want to tell her that any
moderately literate moron could be a proofreader. “That’s right,” I
say. But it’s a good idea, actually, and I make a mental note to
look into it. She tells me there were a lot of jobs in the D.C.
classifieds, then tells me about the professional “aura” of the
city, the exciting lives they must all lead.

“Surely not all of
them.”

She ignores me and goes on
about the day she spent with William’s parents. They dressed like
“rich city people” for lunch at an expensive restaurant, and then
they changed into “street clothes” to visit Mount
Vernon.

“Thank God it’s the last
time I’ll ever have to see his mother,” she says. She taps a finger
on the table. “You know what, though, Mia? She wasn’t even that
bad. All the complaining I did, all the whining—I was incredibly
immature. Once I realized she was no longer my mother in-law, I
started to see her differently. As a woman instead of as William’s
mother. And she’s a pretty wonderful lady.”

I want to ask her, I need to
know,
what does dead look like,
because until you see it, it can’t be real, can
it? “How was she? At the funeral, I mean.”

“Crying. Sad. What
else?”

“Did…uh…how did—?
William?”

“What do you mean,
‘William’?”

“Sorry. I mean, was it an
op—”

“Oh. No.” Her look
says
Don’t ask
and
so I don’t
.
“I
still can’t get over it,” she says. “Do you know what I mean?
An
accident.
It
could have happened here! He went all the way over there to die in
some…” she shakes her head, searching, “…some foolish
accident.
He should have
been shot down,” she says. “That would make more sense than flying
into wires. Then again, he was the only one who ever said he was a
good pilot. How do I know if he was or not? Maybe he was the worst
they had.”

“Jake always said he was
very good,” I say, which is not true. Jake said nothing about
William’s flying one way or the other.

She shrugs. She shrugs a
lot, and I never noticed. “It doesn’t matter now, does it? Dead is
dead.” She refills her glass, then mine.

“Brian said William asked
for it,” I say. The wine
is
good. Too good. My glass holds all that remains of
the Pinot, and the nausea hasn’t left, but I’m getting better at
ignoring it.

She sets down her glass.
“No, he didn’t.”

I tell her about Brian’s
visit, the things he said.

She shakes her head. “He
didn’t mean it that way. You would have to know Brian.”

The way she says
Brian—vowels drawn out, soft—and the way she strokes her glass…it
was her. In his car, on my street.

I think about his hand on
her thigh, repulsive just days after William’s funeral, and on the
heel of my disgust trails an odd sexual excitement, the same
conflicted—and fairly recent—thrill that swells when, considering a
possible future, I imagine Jake attracted to someone else. He
smiles at her, some anonymous beautiful woman, and kisses her in
the dark of a helicopter on the tarmac at night. I hate him in
those moments and believe I could probably kill in a passionate
instant. I’m also inexplicably aroused. But only for a second. It
must be a consequence of all this abstinence.

“Brian dodged the
war.”

“He didn’t ‘dodge,’
Mia.”

“Close enough.”

“I guess that’s it, then!”
she says, throwing up her hands. “I officially dislike him, now.”
She lights another cigarette. She’s been smoking them quickly, one
after the other. She used to space them out, unless I count the
night she found out about William. “What do you think? Do you think
we’re two strangers who’ve spent the last few years sweating under
the sheets without a word to one another? We know each other, Mia.
Do you understand? It’s not a torrid tryst, not some cheap
affair
. You and I have
already talked about this.”

“I know.” Still, there is a
determination to destroy her confidence in Brian’s devotion, her
easy acceptance of William’s death. It’s not at all fair to her.
She fell out of love, is all, and maybe he did, too, at some point.
Can it ever be only one person who falls out of love? William had
to have let go, to some degree, or he couldn’t have stayed. Not
without destroying himself.