Chasing Fire

of his game, and he picks her. At the same time, she’s rebelling against a pretty strict, stuffy upbringing. She was nearly ten years younger than Dad, and probably enjoyed the idea of playing house with him. Over the winter, he’s starting up his business, but he’s around. My grandparents are, too, and she’s carrying the child of their only son. She’s the center. Her parents have cut her off, just severed all ties.”
    “How do people do that? How do they justify that, live with that?”
    “They think they’re right. And I think that added to the excitement for her. And in the spring, there I am, so she’s got a new baby to show off. Doting grandparents—a husband who’s besotted, and still around.”
    She chose another berry, let it lie on her tongue a moment, sweet and firm. “Then a month later, the season starts, and he’s not around every day. Now it’s about changing diapers, and walking a squalling baby in the middle of the night. It’s not such an adventure now, or so exciting.”
    She reached for another piece of chicken. “He’s never, not once, said a word against her to me. What I know of that time I got from reading letters he’d locked up, riffling through papers, eavesdropping—or occasionally catching my grandmother when she was pissed off and her tongue was just loose enough.”
    “You wanted to know,” Gull said simply.
    “Yeah, I wanted to know. She left when I was five months old. Just took me over to my grandparents, asked if they’d watch me while she ran some errands, and never came back.”
    “Cold.” He couldn’t quite get his mind around that kind of cold, or what that kind of cold would do to the child left behind. “And clueless,” he added. “It says she decided this isn’t what I want after all, so I’ll just run away.”
    “That sums it. My dad tracked her down, a couple of times. Made phone calls, wrote letters. Her line, because I saw the letters she wrote back, was it was all his fault. He was the cold and selfish one, had wrecked her emotionally. The least he could do was send her some money while she was trying to recover. She’d promise to come back once she had, claimed she missed me and all that.”
    “Did she come back?”
    “Once, on my tenth birthday. She walks into my party, all smiles and tears, loaded down with presents. It’s not my birthday party anymore.”
    “No, it’s her Big Return, putting her in the center again.”
    Rowan stared at him for a long moment. “That’s exactly it. I hated her at that moment, the way a ten-year-old can. When she tried to hug me, I pushed her away. I told her to get out, to go to hell.”
    “Sounds to me that at ten you had a good bullshit detector. How’d she handle it?”
    “Big, fat tears, shock, hurt—and bitter accusations hurled at my father.”
    “For turning you against her.”
    “And again, you score. I stormed right out the back door, and I’d have kept on going if Dad hadn’t come out after me. He was pissed, all the way around. I knew better than to speak to anyone like that, and I was going back inside, apologizing to my mother. I said I wouldn’t, he couldn’t make me, and until he made her leave, I was never going back in that house. I was too mad to be scared. Respect was god in our house. You didn’t lie and you didn’t sass—the big two.”
    “How did he handle it?”
    “He picked me right up off the ground, and I know he was worked up enough to cart me right back in there. I punched him, kicked him, screamed, scratched, bit. I didn’t even know I was crying. I do know if he’d dragged me in, if he’d threatened me, ordered me, if he who’d never raised a hand to me had raised it, I wouldn’t have said I was sorry.”
    “Then you’d’ve broken the other big one, by lying.”
    “The next thing I knew we were sitting on the ground in the backyard, I’m crying all over his shoulder. And he’s hugging me, petting me and telling me I was right. He said, ‘You’re right, and I’m sorry.’ He told me to sit right there, and he’d go in and make her go away.”
    She tipped back her glass. “And that’s what he did.”
    “You got lucky, too.”
    “Yeah, I did. She didn’t.”
    Rowan paused, looked out over the pond. “A little over two years later, she goes into a convenience store to pick up something, walks in on a robbery. And she’s dead, wrong place, wrong time. Horrible. Nobody deserves to die bleeding on the floor of a quick market in