Part One
House Fire
Chapter 1
She knows only the man across the table.
Father.
His cold eyes like drops of oil. Full cup of coffee, black. An impatient trimmed fingernail tapping a lace coverlet. In his other fist, he holds a glass vial filled with her blood.
She flips her hand to see the cut, but it’s closed up now. Only a thin mark remains across the treelike lines of her palm. The head, the heart, the life, the fate. All bullshit, at least for her. She will never have love, a life, a destiny.
She will just havehim.
“Very good.” Father’s voice is sleet on the back of her neck. He sets the vial down and wipes her blood from his knife blade with a napkin.
Her reflection swims in the vial’s concave side. Violet bags droop low over her freckled cheeks.
She knows what he will say next so vividly, she could be an oracle.
Two consecutive blows, each worse than the actual incision across her palm.
Scrape.The knife slides across the table, its wooden handle pointed at her.
“Now, again.”
Chapter 2
Fireworks rattle the old window, casting red and blue light across James’s typewriter. In the square below, Lincoln’s measly population is gathered like the townspeople at the end of a Christmas film with an unrealistically positive ending. The villain has a change of heart. Love never dies. Every cat gets adopted into a happy home. The people down there, aunts and cousins and past teachers and peers, gape open mouthed at the rainbow sparkles above the downtown gazebo like children mesmerized by a shiny necklace.If they’re the townspeople,James thinks,that makes me the grumpy hermit.Glued to his work, cooped up in his mountaintop lair.
James tries to concentrate by pretending the crackling fireworks are jazz instrumentals. Nothing but background noise, like the hum of his teal Smith Corona typewriter. Like his parents and his sister, Midi, talking over steak and broccoli during Sunday dinner. Like everything he once loved seems to have become.
Background noise. Even writing.
His fingers poise over the keys, unsure how to continue. He promised his boss, Nancy, that he would have his assignment, about the new crosswalk beside the high school, finished for the paper’s next issue, but the deadline is in two days, and so far he has written only three thin paragraphs.
Nancy doesn’tlovewhen he asks repeatedly for extensions, and shehatesthat he only submits finished articles on typewritten pages. Shecalled him a “pretentious ass” once under her breath, but she desperately needed help at the underfundedLincoln Gazette, and James needed a summer job. Thus began his dreary articles about painted stripes on asphalt. Instead of sunbathing on a beach somewhere, he devotes hours every day to a cramped newspaper office built in 1864. He doesn’t hate the work—words are his passion, in any form or fashion—but he prefers to craft prose about dragons and murders and love affairs, not crosswalks.
James rolls the half-finished page out of the typewriter and stares at the shitty writing as if he can magically will it to improve. After a moment of consideration, he balls it in a fist and tosses it in a metal bin. Fireworks reflect against the window, crackling like gunfire. He replaces his fingers on the keys as his half-empty coffee mug goes lukewarm.
Downstairs, the front door of his parents’ house creaks open, breaking his weak concentration again. Even his mom’s mouselike steps make the century-old floorboards groan.
Her voice cuts through the bones of the house. “James!”
Sighing, he descends from his lair into the hallway that stretches from one end of the house to the other.
“Yeah?” He dreads his mom’s worried tone when she asks why he isn’t out with everyone.
She pokes her head in from the kitchen, her brown hair threaded with silver. “Uncle Benji’s fireworks probably have about ten minutes left, then your dad goes on.”
As much as James wants to say,Sorry, Mom, I’m not coming out tonight, he can’t force it out. It’s important to her that he stand beside his dad and sister, completing the ideal family portrait for the town to see, bathed in colors like they are caught in the cross fire of strobe lights. Is it important to him? No, but many thingsarethat he would never expect his mother to understand. So he bends to her will, as he so often does, even when it breaks him.
“Yeah,” he says. “I’m coming.”
“Good. Help me carry some stuff out.”
James schleps a red cooler across the manicured lawn and down the street to Lincoln’s square. He drops it beside a gingham-covered picnic table laden with burgers and hot dogs. Firework smoke swirls with grill char, reeking of summer in the South. His dad flips burgers over flaming charcoal, a grease-stained apron tied around his waist. As the mayor of Lincoln, Peter Finch travels a lot, his arms tan now from a recent work trip to Savannah. His face is movie-star quality, his biceps push the constraints of his shirtsleeves, and he has an off-white, dimpled smile that puts people at ease. All genetic traits that somehow surpassed his only son, who hides his thin arms inside baggy blue sweatshirt sleeves, whose resting bitch face, hard brows, and sharp cheekbones tend to make people feel unsettled.
