The evening came quick and cool, luring neighbors out of houses and into the small yards that lay between them. Across the street, Mr. Blythe brought in groceries, the Blackburns cooked on their gas grill, two of the Chenault’s kids rode big wheels up and down the sidewalk. There was a peace throughout the modest houses on Henry Clay Boulevard that Saturday night, as though things had been put in their proper places, cleaned and tidied, so that a person could move easily amongst them and not trip over toys or children.

That morning, Gary Jacobs had sanded the cabinets in his kitchen. He was two weeks into its renovation and seven months into the house’s fix-up, or the Fix, as he called it. A little more priming and he’d be ready to apply a new coat. The heat and work were tiring, though. He rested his head against the open cabinet door and wiped the sweat from his brow with a rag off the floor.

From outside, the whir of an electric lawn mower drew his attention through the side window to Sasha’s yard. Between his house and hers, grass and honeysuckle vines grew over a feeble, metal fence. On Gary’s side, paint cans and a wooden ladder, partly covered by a blue tarp, rested against the cracked concrete foundation. Water collected on dips in the tarp’s folds, and a bicycle, with a rusted chain, lay crookedly beside it upon the house’s siding. The yard had looked this way for many months.

As he leaned across the windowsill to get a better look, Gary expected to see a high-school boy or a new, mysterious boyfriend at the helm of the mower. “Hm,” he grunted. It was Sasha.

Sasha had moved in eight months ago. It was her first house. She was as independent a woman as Gary had ever met. That’s what he liked these days, someone who didn’t glom onto another person like a torn piece of wallpaper to a healthy wooden wall.

Gary stepped outside onto the concrete patio. “You know those things will kill you,” he yelled. Sasha didn’t hear him. “Those things will kill you,” he shouted louder.

She swiveled the mower. “What?” She hollered, switching off the motor. She swiped a thick blade of grass from her tanned cheek.

Gary tried again: “I don’t know anyone who’s had one of those things who kept it more than two mowings. They’ll kill you. Lose a finger or two. At the very least, you’ll cut the cord in half in about three minutes.”

“It’s worth it. You should be grateful. It’s so much quieter than the others.”
“It’s not that quiet. You’d be better off with an old wood and iron pusher.”

“Or a neighbor who’ll come do it for me,” she laughed.

“Not this one,” said Gary. “I’ve got more work inside than I know what to..”

“Some other time, then,” Sasha grinned and turned on the mower again. Gary watched her a second longer. In the loitering air, he could almost smell the soap sweating off her skin.

When Gary’s daughter, Annie, arrived later that afternoon, she skipped to her rose-covered bedroom. Roses grew along the wall, in the top border, across the ceiling. It had been an old lady’s room. A room where Annie could stretch out onto the high bed. A bed like her grandmother’s. A bed where she could sit and watch her dad get ready for a date like he used to do with her mother -- his hair wet and slick.

Her dad had told her that as soon as the kitchen was finished, they would fix up her room. They’d put new flowers on the walls, like oil painted lilies hung in a museum. She would have a brighter rug and, maybe, even a pink canopy bed like Jasmine, who lived down the street. They would start with a puffy bedspread. Her dad said on the phone earlier in the week that he’d found one at K-mart that he’d pick up before she came. She walked in, expecting something cute but grown-up. Instead, the same gray, faded sheets and pilled polyester blankets lay piled on the bed. He had forgotten.

Later, as she sat on the kitchen floor painting beside her dad, Annie daydreamt about slipcovers and the color pink.

“Goddamnit!”  

“What, what’s wrong?” Annie asked. 

“You can’t just wipe the paint all over the place.” Annie’s hand wasn’t as steady as her father’s.

“Give me that brush. Put some water on this.” Gary threw her a rag. “See if you can get it off. If it’s dried, then it’s too late.” With his fingernail, he scraped at the stray paint.

“I didn’t see it there.”

“Here give it to me,” he said and took the rag back. She had already dampened it in the sink. “Just hang onto this and hand it to me when I need it.”

Annie rolled her eyes and slumped against the wall.

In his kitchen that evening, while the rest of the street played outside, Gary tuned a paint-spattered boom box to the classic rock station. He sang along to a guitar anthem, and Annie hummed with him, as though she knew the lyrics, too. They had returned from a trip to A&W with leftover Neapolitan shakes. Annie sat on the kitchen countertop and sipped from the straw while bouncing her heels against the recently dried cabinets. She had brought in Oscar, her hamster, and his cage to keep beside her. Gary cleaned the paint tools, squeezing the roller and flicking the moisture from the brush heads. The milky water flowed down the steel drain.

Gary turned to admire the new linoleum, its black and white squares, the new crown molding that he had bought a nail gun to install, the backsplash tile behind the stove, and, now, the white cabinets. He hadn’t known if the floor would stick, if the wood would fit, if the plaster would dry, or if any of the projects he began would end in less than disaster.

He had no confidence in this kind of work. He’d had one real job in his life as a recruiter at the University, back when Annie was a baby. He’d fax high school principals news of scholarships, endowments, and work-study programs. Then, he’d stop by Keeneland, the racetrack, on the way home and bet a week’s salary on the Nine horse in the Eighth. Eventually, he started and ended his day at the races.

Despite, or because of, his novice skills, after Gary accomplished each project, each exercise of manual labor, he found himself satisfied in a way elusive to him as a white-collar man. Even the high of winning a big payoff only meant that he gambled more in search of another endlessly so for many years. With this renovation, however, he could improve something and make things better. There was an end to things.

A bare light bulb shone brightly in the room; a new light fixture, silver and sleek, was on order at the hardware store. Dried paint globs along the side of a cabinet door were highlighted beneath the glare. White flecks of paint were exposed on strands of Gary’s hair, as were nicks of blood along Annie’s legs where she had tried to shave them the night before. Along the periphery, the windows framed the dense black night. Only what the naked bulb shone upon seemed alive. Annie looked at her dad, the specks of paint seeming goofy, the old work boots seeming cool. Jasmine was right; he was handsome. Annie’s gaze followed her father’s as he surveyed the room. He seemed pleased, and so she was, too.

“Tomorrow, after you leave, I’m going to throw that stuff out, like I told you,” Gary said. “It’s time to move on and really do something with that other bedroom. It’s fine when you’re not here, but when I have to sleep in there, all I’ve got to look at is someone else’s junk, which, I might add, looks uglier from a blow-up mattress.”

“Okay,” Annie said. “But, what if I put it in my room, like in the closet so it’s out of the way?”

“It’s still in the house. The point is to get it out. You never know what’s attached to all that shit. I don’t want to be responsible for it anymore.”

“But if it’s out of the way,” she said. “I won’t leave it out or anything.”

“Listen. I don’t want it in the house. What part of that do you not understand?”

“Fine, I’ll just take it to Mom’s, then.”

“Good. She could use it.”

It wasn’t really junk, rather a vase etched in vines, a blue straw hat, a picture of a woman in a housedress, and a fountain pen. Annie’s favorite was the Band-Aid tin filled with white slips of paper, a collection of fortunes from Chinese fortune cookies. These were the treasures that Annie and Gary had found as they cleaned the house. They had also discovered rusted paper clips and coupons, expired six years ago, amongst other debris that Gary promptly trashed. Sometimes, Annie took Oscar in the extra room to pretend she was a fortuneteller. Oscar was her receptionist. She’d play as though Jasmine had come over for tea and to have her fortune read, her bright and distant future. With a shake of the tin box, there it was.   

“Save a life and it is yours forever.” Annie would remind herself to throw away the ones like this that she didn’t understand.

Gary put the can of white gingham by the back door. He placed a hand on Annie’s knee and a kiss on her forehead. “We did good work in here today, baby.”
Annie shrunk from his lips. “Mission accomplished,” she said.

“Mission accomplished,” he said.

Annie was glad now to turn on the t.v. in her room and to watch one of the Saturday night movies. She was tired of helping her dad. She was tired of him. She would put Oscar on the bed with her and watch him crawl over her chest and stomach. Then, she would put him in his mobile home, supplied with as many accoutrements as could fit and plenty of wood shavings for the most comfortable nest, and then she would fall asleep. Her dad would find his way to the blow-up mattress in the other room, surrounded by all the junk.

“How about turning out that light with the switch behind you, sugar?” Gary asked as he pulled out a Coke from the refrigerator and stepped through the back door. Annie flipped the switch. She turned on the TV in the other room and closed the door behind her. The kitchen was dark.

Gary sat on the patio as he often did at night and watched the headlights on Breck Avenue behind the house. He imagined how he was going to pay for the repairs to the foundation. He spent his mother’s inheritance on the down payment, as she wanted. The money she’d left for Annie was already in a trustee’s account.

He should talk to Ed to see if he had more work on the apartments off Hillcrest. He could look to Ed to remind him that he could manage financially. He just had to live within his means and not think that his means will improve with a bet or a trip to the track. Then, there was Annie, standing before him, nervous little Annie.

“Can’t you see it?”

“Well, no, I can’t from here.”

“It smells funny, too.”

Gary rose from the step.

“You can’t see that? Look,” Annie said. “Look. You have to go over there.”


Sasha had begun the day wondering if she should call Joe. She thought better of it and determined to keep herself busy. She called her mother who told her that she shouldn’t expect so much from a man and if it was meant to be, it was meant to be.  A trip might do her good so she bought a couple of travel magazines at the drug store. She kept busy, mowed the yard, saw Gary, and was made glad for Joe again, however flawed he was, as a result.

That night, inside Sasha’s house, two things were happening. Sasha slept. She breathed heavily. If she awoke now, a slight pain would pierce her head, and her eyes would be thick with the weight of her dreams. Early in the evening, she had taken some cold medicine to help her sleep. Secondly, a fire started. The batiked tapestry that curtained her living room window became enflamed. The wood of the windowsill began to scorch, and the vase of wildflowers, which rested upon it, burst in a solid “pop.”

If she could have awakened, without the medicine to cloud her thoughts, then she would have cussed at herself for leaving the living room candles lit. Perhaps the pill had dissolved into her blood faster than normal, or perhaps she had been too distracted by the articles on tropical resorts she had lain down on the mattress to read. No matter, she would have considered the fire another mistake that she couldn’t make better.


“I thought you liked her.”

“I do.”

“Then go save her.” 

“Hold on just a minute,” Gary said as he sniffed the air. It was probably a trash pile alit in one of the vacant lots nearby, he thought. The color behind Sasha’s shades could be a scarlet scarf over her lamp, or candles for one of her meditation sessions that she sometimes jabbered on about.

“You should go help her,” Annie pleaded again. She was beginning to feel anxious, as though someone were watching and saying, That’s not right. That’s not right at all. “Go help her!”

“I’m not the only person she’s ever slept with, you know,” Gary snapped.

Annie felt sick. Of course, Annie didn’t know this. Annie was a little girl. How should she know whom her dad loved?


Yet, it was true that late one afternoon, a few months ago, Sasha had come by to return a tape measure. She had worn a t-shirt from a concert she’d attended. The list of concert dates and towns were obscured by dots of paint along the back and sleeves. Her jeans were loose and baggy through the hips, stolen from an ex-boyfriend. The sole of her right shoe was detached and flopped up at the torn toe. But her complexion was clear, not a pore to be seen, no shine, just fuzz and softness, cleanliness.

Gary invited her to stay for a drink.

“An aperitif?” Gary joked.

“Whatever you have.”

“A Coke.” He showed an already opened glass bottle.

"In a bottle? I’d love one.”

Gary pulled up a lone folding chair Annie used for sunbathing. He brushed off some leaves and presented Sasha with the seat and a Coke.

“That tastes good,” she said.

“Yeah, it tastes different than the cans, huh?”

“Reminds me of vacations. Road trips, you know. Where your brother beats you up over the no man’s land in the back seat.”

“You should’ve beat him back.”

“Oh, I did, eventually.”

A moment passed until Gary asked, “Have you ever been to Mammoth Cave?” 

“I should, right? But I haven’t. It’s one of those things you should do if you’re from here, but because you’re from here, you don’t do it.”

“Yeah, well, there’s a great restaurant on the highway into the park’s entrance. Best, best, best hamburger you’ll find in the whole state. They’ve got an old Coke fountain, too. But it’s worth the trip to have the hamburger. Well, I shouldn’t say that. Mammoth Cave is incredible. Just magnificent in the way the Grand Canyon is. Well, I shouldn’t say that. The Grand Canyon is a place altogether in its own world. But for Kentucky, Mammoth Cave is all right. You go there, and all these signs on the roads are Mammoth. Literally. And they say Mammoth all over them. Mammoth Motel. Mammoth Motor Inn. Mammoth Drug Store. And then people come from all over like Tennessee and Georgia. Memphis, you know.

“I went with my mother and Annie. Of course, my mother didn’t even want to go in the caves. She sat on a bench with a bunch of other nervous nellies. I should be nice. She sat there with some other old women with orthopedic shoes who didn’t want to slip. They do say that, too, that you shouldn’t go climbing through there if it’s wet or if you have on flip flops. Even though there were plenty of kids with flip flops walking around. It was her idea, and she didn’t even come have a look. So we had to tell her afterwards that we had seen a bunch of bears and bats and snakes just to scare her.

“It’s cool, though. Once you get in there, it’s this big black tunnel. Like a big hole to eternity. All the way down to neverness. That’s what I thought afterwards. Annie took a tumble at one point, when we were creeping along a ledge not more than a couple feet wide. It scared the shit out of me. She tripped and then I nearly tripped on her. Almost had a heart attack. I was so afraid she’d fall over. Worst feeling in the world. I picked her up, and just looked over the ledge like, whoah, that’s a long way down. Scared me to death. It really did feel like you were looking into forever, or never.

“Anyway, you should go sometime. It’s very cool. Better to go now than in the winter, too. It’d be a cold place to get lost in.”

“Sounds impressive.”

“Me or the caves?” Gary asked.

“The caves. Although I bet women say the same of you. Easy on the eyes. Pockets full of cash.”

“Well, now. I’m good, but not that good.” Gary took a sip of Coke. “Truth is, I don’t even have any money. Gambled too much and lost it all. I got this house by losing my mother. Kind of funny. Not losing her, she was a beautiful woman. She made me sensitive to women and to taking care of things. But I gambled that away, too, until I had nothing again. Except for this house, that’s all I want. I want to keep with nothing.”

Sasha nodded. He seemed practiced at such philosophy. She could take his talk or leave it, but she did like his leather boots, and the torn and holey polo work shirt he wore. “You’ve got this,” she said. “You’ve got a house in Richmond, and Annie.”

“Yeah, I guess. I mean, I didn’t have anything going on up in Lexington any more, except for Annie, but she comes down here pretty much every weekend. She’s so easygoing, it’s not like I have to take care of her anyway. She helps me do stuff around here and that’s good. But, yeah, I wanted a place to fix up. I started getting a bit of work with my friend, Ed Cowgill, do you know him? Works over at the lumberyard. I do a little bit of stuff for him every now and then. I mean, I could sell the house, well, I could make some money off it once it’s fixed up. So, I’m just working on that for a while, I suppose.”

Although she had solicited his words, Sasha’s mind meandered away again to her own life and her own house. She imagined saying, in a conversation in which Gary was interested in what she did, I wanted to be a nurse, but didn’t finish school. I work as an office manager at a pharmacy instead. By age thirty-three, I thought my life would look different. Ex-boyfriends? Yes. A dry spell in my twenties, and now, Joe, a friend of a friend who’s nice, just nice. I own this house. It’s cute. It has a roof that doesn’t leak. “Sorry, what’d you say?”

“A therapist. My ex-wife wanted me to go to one of those support groups. And I did once. Then he said something about the Buddhists saving a life to be responsible for it later and then...”

“Fate. It’s meant to mean if you change someone’s fate, you have to watch them forever. You’ve fucked up their fate.”

“That’s a lot of responsibility. A lot of stuff.”

“It’s just stuff.”

“Well, I liked this other idea he had. Get rid of bad energy. Things that don’t help you, that’re unlucky. I guess I’ll always believe in luck even it’s only bad luck.”

“Really?” Sasha smiled. She disagreed with nearly everything he said. “Well, the house looks good. You’ve done a nice job.” She didn’t have much more sympathy or energy to spare. He had talked a lot, and she had been patient.

Sasha excused herself to the bathroom. Gary needed another Coke and stepped into the kitchen. When she came back through, Gary showed off the tiles he’d found at an estate sale. “Feel them,” he said. “It’s got specks of lapis lazuli in it.” He took Sasha’s wrist and put her index finger to the patterned squares behind the stovetop. 

“It’s nice,” she said, aware that the evening would be different now.

“It is, isn’t it.” Gary slipped his hand into hers. Her palm was warm, while the skin of his had a rough patch near the thumb joint from all the hammering he’d done.

They had sex. Neither of them described it as anything more than that to their friends. Couldn’t she just have thought him mildly attractive? Wasn’t it enough he wore shirts like her brother and made jokes like her ex-boyfriends? And him, couldn’t it just have been a long time? Couldn’t he just want someone who was clean and had listened to him?

That night, when he couldn’t sleep beside her -- her body was too hot and, with someone else in it, the mattress lumped near his hip -- he arose and measured how far apart the shelves above the kitchen table should be. She got up later and, without acknowledging him, save for a peek at a bedside photo of him with Annie at what looked like a giant hole in the earth, walked through the front door, across the clutter-strewn yard, and into her own house. It welcomed her with a scent of vanilla.
  

Gary’s movements were petrified while thoughts like fissures flashed into his head. He remembered how awkward he and Sasha had been in bed. He thought of how he had hit his head on her chin and how she had almost fallen off the mattress as he adjusted his position.

He also thought about the fight he saw two days ago between her and Joe. She had said to Joe, “You’re not listening to me. You’re not listening at all. Don’t come back here again.” Gary could see Joe at the base of Sasha’s porch steps, losing his balance as he backed off the last ledge. Gary stood by the window above the sink to hear better, but Joe’s words were too soft. “Too bad,” Gary had said to himself.  “Too bad.”

In a second more, Gary thought about Annie. She was acting like her mother. Putting blame on him. Making him responsible.

“You can just go back inside. Take Oscar and go on back to bed,” he told her.

“No, I want you to go over there and help her.”

“Get back inside.” With each word, he glared his command into her.
Annie slipped Oscar into the pocket of her pajama pants and strode through the metal storm door, which banged shut behind her. Immediately, she went to the telephone and called 911.

Gary’s hands moved across his forehead, over the crown, and down the nape of his neck. His chest and shoulders were hot. He was feeling hemmed in by Annie, by the foundation in need of repair, by the remembrance of Sasha’s back and the moles like beestings that decorated it, by a ledge that dropped to neverness. 

The flickering flashes behind Sasha’s windowpanes weren’t so distinguishable after all. Annie must’ve been wrong. Then, a streaking flame ran through Sasha’s kitchen and illuminated what seemed like the whole world.

Gary followed the yard’s perimeter as he moved to the side of the house. He stopped. In the tarp-covered pile, he fished for a bucket, a water-filled can, or a hose that could reach to Sasha’s window. None were handy. Yet, Gary paced; he did not venture forward.

From around the corner came Annie. “I called 911. I don’t care what you said.” She was in tears. “I want you to go over there and do something. You asshole.”
She stepped toward Sasha’s, over the crumpled, rusted wire fence, its posts rotted and loose. Her foot was soon caught in the vines of the honeysuckle and a stray rope camouflaged by the foliage. As she shook to untangle her foot, she fell onto her right side and the pocket where she kept Oscar. A panic set in with each kick to the vines.

Gary lifted Annie swiftly by her underarms and freed her from the treacherous underbrush. She only cried more. “Calm down,” Gary said. “You’ve got to calm down, sweetie.” Annie’s voice was gutted by sobs. Her arms batted the wisps of vine, the pockets of air, the light leaves, and found no fur, nor warmth, no Oscar.


Two fire engines and an ambulance arrived at Sasha’s house within minutes of Annie’s phone call. They merely pushed open the unlocked front door and entered. They soaked the walls with water and followed a clear path through to the bedroom where they found Sasha who was dazed. The fire had licked the edges of her bed and crept over her sheets. She screamed; she was frightened. Her eyes focused on black masks, the bugged, hollow eyes of the faces she met upon waking.

In the back of the ambulance, the haze in her head cleared as the pain in her legs and fingertips registered up her spinal cord, to the brain stem, until it became this thought: I’ve never felt this before. At the hospital, the nurses applied balms and the doctors prescribed morphine. Sasha had third degree burns over her legs, hands, and parts of her back.

As Gary and Annie watched the gurney roll over Sasha’s front walk to the ambulance, they smelled wilted ashes. It was like the Fourth of July when Annie and her cousins would run up to the fence at the fairgrounds and try to catch the falling embers from the fireworks. Yet, Annie did not want to get further than where she was now. Her father carried her close to him, holding her against his side, her body resting heavily upon his hip. He smelled to her like himself, like shaving cream and dust.

Annie had stopped wailing almost as soon as he had picked her up from the brambles. In that instant, Gary had seen Oscar. By the light of the kitchen, Gary pawed at him, with Annie in his other arm. Oscar darted into the well of the basement window and Gary grabbed him. The creature’s incisors pierced Gary’s forefinger, but Gary held on to him despite the sting. “Look, here he is,” Gary said as he put the fragile menace back into Annie’s pocket. She stroked Oscar’s gray hair like a talisman.

The next morning, Gary got up before Annie. He carried a garbage bag into the junk-filled extra room where he had slept on the flimsy airbed the night before. Everything that they had collected went into it except for the Band Aid tin that he put by the door to Annie’s bedroom so she could take it to her mother’s house. These things had proven to be unluckier than he had thought.

When Annie awoke, she did not want to get out of bed. She smelled the settling cinders from next door and was reminded that she had called her dad an “asshole” the night before. He would be mad today. Her eyes were swollen and crusts of old tears stuck to the inside of her lids. Yet, her eyesight had been clear last night and she had seen her father afraid.

Gary stood in the spare bedroom in his work clothes. He couldn’t decide whether or not to refinish the floors. This dirty rug, patterned in vines, would have to come up, but he could get some cheap carpet installed. The room would be cozier that way. He should get something with natural fibers that was less prone to catch fire. He should check his extinguishers, too, he remembered, and put a battery in the smoke detector.

“Good morning,” Gary said to Annie who’d gotten up after all. Just like that he said it.


Sasha didn’t need to return to Henry Clay Boulevard. Two days after the fire, her mother led a brigade of friends and co-workers who packed up her remaining possessions and trucked them back to her parents’ house in an afternoon. Insurance covered most of the damage. With it and donations from her friends, she bought a new house in a subdivision called Eastgate on the other side of the by-pass.

She stayed at the pharmacy. They had been so generous about her sick days while she was in the hospital. The burns affected her gait, but she had recuperated most of the dexterity in her hands. It was vanity that handicapped her the most. She hadn’t considered herself to be particularly interested in her looks until she lost them, or so she thought to herself. Never did she put on shorts, only loose, cotton pants in the summer. For the rare wedding, she did wear a low-cut dress. And she spent more time in the sun, staying tan, in hopes that the color would conceal her scars.

Joe had been good to her. The memory of their fight had long since evaporated. He had come to the hospital at the request of Sasha’s mother. They had been together enough months to have a repertoire of jokes that only couples have. She laughed as he toppled her water cup onto the blanket, as they both knew how accident-prone he was.

Sasha didn’t hear from Gary after she left for the hospital. Her mother had told her that the 911 call came from his phone, that he had told Annie to call as the flames had leapt too high for him to enter her house. She had thought about writing him a note, but she hesitated. She didn’t need to go back to Henry Clay Boulevard, but, one day, she did.

The extra bedroom was almost finished. The carpet was in place, and the burgundy paint had dried. Earlier in the afternoon, Gary had let Annie run off to the middle school to play kickball with Jasmine. She had been excited to come back and help her dad put the final touches on the room so that he could move in his new mattress set and then take her to A&W.

With the oak door to the bedroom detached and propped on an old desk, Gary took a wood shaver to the top edge. It had to be shortened to match the thicker carpet. A plastic sheet lay beneath the desk to catch the shavings.

A small fan rested on the windowsill. Annie stood by it, with Oscar in her hands. His fur flew back into the shape of a stylish hairdo from the fifties. Putting her face behind the hamster, she spoke into the rotating blades: “I-i-i-i-i a-a-a-a-m-m-m-m-m a v-a-m-p-i-r-e,” her voice resounded ominously against the waves of air like a real monster.

“Someday, you can have this,” Gary said.

“What?” she said and turned away from her toy.

"Someday this will be yours, and you can do whatever you want with it. Sell it off if you want to. Change the colors of the walls. You’ll have to wait until I’m dead, though. I decided I’m going to refinance it and stay. Once you put so much time into something, you want to sit back and enjoy it. Reap the benefits of all that hard work. So, someday, you’ll get a crack at the place, it’ll be yours someday.”

“That’ll be never. You’ll be here forever.”

She jumped across the plastic and peeked down the hall. Someone had knocked at the front door.

Sasha was dressed in her usual jeans and long-sleeved shirt although it was August now and she must have been sweating along the seams of her pants. She stood crookedly, Annie noticed, and kept her hands in her pockets as if they would fly off if unrestrained. A blink of shiny white and particularly pink skin crept up from her back beneath her shirt and along her neck. Annie wondered if the rest of her body looked that way, too.

“Dad!” Annie yelled. “Sasha’s here.”

They stood on the front stoop. Sasha had declined an invitation to come in. Gary kept his head down as Sasha spoke:

“Well, I know it’s been a while now, but I wanted to come by and tell you how grateful I am to you for what you did.”

“No, no.”

“Yes, and I think you should know that--”

“No,” Gary glanced down to see Annie looking at Sasha. “It was Annie. She made the call.”

“You’re modest now, but someday, you’ll acknowledge how responsible you are for me. I’m indebted to you forever. I’ll never forget what you did.”

“I didn’t do anything,” he spoke clearly and a bit louder now. He put his hand atop Annie’s head as if to swivel her eyes away to the Blythe’s front yard. “I didn’t do anything.”

“You did everything.”

“Really, that’s enough. Thanks for coming by. We’re glad you’re better. We’ve got work to do now, don’t we?” Gary said. Annie couldn’t manage a nod. She was transfixed still on Sasha's neck.

“I didn’t do anything,” her father repeated.

“Thank you,” Sasha kept at it, “thank you.”

After Sasha drove off, she thought about what a strange man Gary was. Yet, he had done something good, and had a lovely daughter. She was glad she’d returned. She wouldn’t worry so much about thanking him again.

Annie had noted her father’s discomfort. He twitched his hand just so on the top of her head. The anxious feeling she had the night of the fire reentered her stomach. Something wasn’t right.

Deep down, Gary pictured a ledge in a cave and a shiny path to neverness. There were some things you just couldn’t not do, he finally concluded.

When they walked back into the bedroom, the wood shavings had blown off of the plastic sheet. The fan had tilted to shoot the outside air directly at the pile. It was a mess.

“Goddamnit, Annie. It’s all over the place. Didn’t I tell you not to let that thing blow all in here? Go grab that sweeper from the hall closet and pick this up.”
She opened the closet door and kicked around a broom until she saw the red box of the sweeper on the floor. She slammed the door shut, turned back to the bedroom, and said to herself, “Someday. Someday.”

She might get the house and paint the walls an ashy black, the sidewalks would stay gray, and the street would be a white way out.