House on Fire (ARC)

by Bonnie Kistler

  When she returned the table still looked cockeyed, so she dragged another chair to the laundry room and stacked it teetering on top of the first.

  How pathetic would it look, she wondered, if she left only one chair at the table. She wondered what people did who always lived alone. Did they keep an empty chair or three at their kitchen tables? She couldn’t imagine it. She’d never lived alone in her life. She lived with her parents, then college roommates, then Shelby in law school, then Ted and marriage and children, then Peter and remarriage and stepchildren. She didn’t know if she was even capable of living alone.

  No, of course she was, she tried to tell herself. She was a strong, capable woman with a busy, fulfilling profession.

  But she was a wife and mother, too, her other voice answered. At least she used to be.

  No, this was silly. She gave herself a shake. She was still a mother, of two fine sons who would be home from school before she knew it. They wouldn’t be working for Peter as originally planned, which was too bad—if they were on-site, she’d have an excuse to drop by with their lunch now and then—but at least they’d be living here with her. There’d soon be plenty of family meals around this table. She went back to the laundry room and dragged one of the chairs back to its place, then went back for the fourth chair and slid it into place under the table.

  There. She sat down again and stared into space until the pasta turned cold and gelatinous on her plate.

  She went to the desk and put her hand on the phone. She could call the twins, but they were in finals now and she shouldn’t cut into their study time. She could call her parents, but it alarmed them to receive phone calls after nine, and she couldn’t risk shaving even a minute off their lives. She could call Shelby Randolph and apologize for their quarrel today. She could call Peter and beg him to come home and bring Kip with him and somehow they’d all learn to walk on the eggshells strewn between them.

  No. She couldn’t do any of those things.

  She pulled her hand from the phone and sat down at the computer and typed a name into the search window. Reverend Stephen Kendall.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Kip finished his AP History paper at midnight on the night before his extended, absolutely final, no excuses deadline. They didn’t have a printer on the job site, so Pete drove him to a twenty-four-hour FedEx Print Center and sat next to him at the worktable and proofread the hundred-plus pages as they slithered out of the machine. He was too exhausted to absorb much of the content of the paper, but it looked like Kip was positing some new theory for the real reason why the Crusades ended. It wasn’t because the Christians lost some crucial battles, though they did. It was because they lost their willingness to forgo earthly life for the sake of some heavenly reward. They began to believe that their hopes of securing a place in heaven depended less on martyrdom and more on living a good life in the here and now.

  Pete was all for living a good life, but he wasn’t sure he liked Kip’s takeaway from all this. “Live in the present is the moral of the story,” the boy said on the drive back to Hollow Road. “Carpe diem, you know? What’s the point of giving up what you want to do in the present for the sake of some future payoff that might never happen? Live for the moment is the only logical way to go.”

  “That’s stupid,” Pete said. “If we only lived for the moment, we’d still be huddling in caves and eating nuts and berries. It’s working toward the future, building things for the next generation—that’s what makes the world tick.”

  “But what about when the future’s full of uncertainty? Who can say where we’ll be next month or next year? So why not party down?”

  “And just give up? The thing to do is to control the future. Shape your own destiny.”

  “That’s an illusion. We don’t have any control over what happens to us.”

  There was something Pete wanted to say to that, but it was two in the morning by then. He let it go.

  The next day was a tough one on barely four hours’ sleep, but he powered through on slugs of coffee and willpower. Kip, though, looked like he was dozing on his feet when Pete picked him up at the end of the school day. He leaned his head back against the seat and closed his eyes with a sleepy little smile on his face.

  But he woke up fast when they reached the site and found Yana Miller in the driveway. She was standing next to a beauty of a car, a vintage Jaguar convertible, gleaming white on the outside and a deep cherry red on the leather upholstery. Kip sat up straight and jumped out of the truck before Pete could even put it in park.

  “Hey,” Kip called, loping up to her.

  “Hey yourzelf.” She leaned back against the rear bumper of the car. She was wearing a black sundress with a flared skirt and a tight bodice that left her white shoulders bare. It looked vintage, too, the dress of a 1940s movie siren.

  “Is Drew inside?” Pete said.

  “No, ees only me,” she said, and Kip laughed like a fool. “I come to ask fawor.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I must begin organize for when we move, yes? But zhere’s too much clutter. In garage and attic and basement. Too much for me, but we don’t want for strangers to touch our zhings, you know? So Drew, he say, why don’t hire Keep for few weeks to geeve hand?”

  Kip blinked wildly, like someone flashed a searchlight in his face.

  “He’s still in school,” Pete said. “Until the tenth.”

  “Starting next day zhen. You do us such fawor. Ten dollars an hour, eef zhat ees fair.”

  Kip turned a look on Pete he hadn’t seen since the boy was eight years old and pleading for a puppy. “He can’t drive.”

  “I can drive heem. Ees no problem.”

  Pete hesitated. He’d been planning on putting Kip to work on the job this summer. But grunt work was grunt work, and a change of scenery might be good for him. And if it kept the Millers happy, so much the better. “Okay with me if it’s okay with him.”

  Kip was all but swaying on his feet. “Um, sure!” he said to Yana.

  She gave him a wide smile in her angular face. “I see you the eleventh zhen.” She got in the convertible and drove off, and Kip stood and watched her go until Shepherd came bounding around the corner of the house with a Frisbee in his mouth. Kip laughed and snatched it from him and sent it sailing up toward the top of the hill.

  Pete decided to call ahead before he drove to the house the next day. Let her know he was coming. That way he could sidestep the question of whether to use his key or knock like a stranger. If she was expecting him, the door would be open and he could walk right in. Assuming she said yes, that is. Assuming she even picked up the phone.

  He thought about it all day, what he should say and what she might say, but he waited until he was a mile from home to make the call. He brought Shep along as an icebreaker, and the dog was squirming with excitement, his head hanging out the window, sniffing in all the familiar scents as they got closer to home.

  It was seven o’clock by then. He wondered if she still bothered to cook, now that it was dinner for one instead of four. His thumb hovered over her name on the screen of his phone, and finally he touched it.

  “Hello?”

  He startled at the sound of her voice. It seemed like years since he heard it. “Hi! I was wondering if I could swing by the house and pick up a few things.”

  “Yes, of course.”

  Her tone was perfunctory, like she was talking to a neighbor or a deliveryman, but the important thing was she said yes. “I need to pick up Kip’s suit and mine,” he said. “Graduation’s coming up.” He’d planned that part carefully, to give her an opening to say she wanted to come to the commencement exercises, too.

  “I’m on my way out right now, but you know where they are, right?”

  Out? Where? They never went out in the evenings unless it was with each other. Where would she even go? To a movie
, to sit alone in the dark? Or maybe to pick up her own dinner. “Okay, so—”

  “Bye.”

  She didn’t realize how close he was. He could be home before she left, and maybe they could go get dinner together. He put the phone down and drove a little faster.

  The turnoff to their road was a quarter mile ahead, and his long-range vision was pretty sharp. Sharp enough to see the Volvo ahead at the intersection. She was already on the road. He pressed down on the gas as the Volvo turned and headed the other way. He was still close enough to catch up with her, but what then? Tail her until she spotted him in the rearview? Honk the horn until she pulled over? But what if she didn’t? He eased off the gas and she disappeared from sight down the road.

  He made the turn onto their road and pulled into the driveway and used his key to open the kitchen door. Shep pushed in ahead of him and stopped to sniff at the floor where his bowl usually stood. Pete stopped and sniffed, too. There were none of the usual cooking aromas, but he caught Leigh’s favorite fragrance in the air. It was his favorite, too, a scent he would always associate with the soft skin between her earlobe and her collarbone, the spot he liked to nuzzle.

  Shep was making the rounds of the first floor, and Pete did the same. Everything in the place looked tidy, and he supposed that was a good sign—no deterioration in cleanliness to suggest depression—except the place was normally a little untidy, the way any busy household full of kids and working parents tended to be. Now it seemed more like a museum exhibit. The Relics of a Fractured Family, circa 2015.

  Upstairs was better. Clothes were strewn across their bed, and she’d left the light on in their bath. The clothes were all dresses, he saw, tried on and rejected and left where they lay. He ran his fingers over the fabrics. These weren’t the kind of clothes she wore to work. These were the dresses she wore to receptions and dinner parties. So where was she going? Her makeup case was open on the bathroom vanity, and three different lipstick tubes rolled loose on the marble top. A dressy dress and lipstick on a Thursday night.

  He packed up his own clothes and grabbed some things for Kip, too. He threw the bags in the truck and went back upstairs for Kip’s TV. Shep was whining at Chrissy’s door when he came down the hall, and he balanced the TV against the wall long enough to push the door open and show him she wasn’t there. The curtains were drawn at the windows, and the room was dim in a way it never was. They were always open when Chrissy lived there. The blinds were always up.

  He kneed Shepherd back and closed the door.

  There were some chores he needed to do. The AC filters had to be changed, and while he was at it, he changed the refrigerator and oven hood filters, too. He did a walk around the outside of the house. Whoever was cutting the grass wasn’t trimming the edges very well, so he got the Weedwacker out of the garage and ran it along the front walk and around the flowerbeds. The motor had run dry on the fountain pump, so he primed it and got the water flowing again. He filled the bird feeder with black oil sunflower seeds.

  The horses were nickering at the fence, and he went back and let them nuzzle his palms. Romeo lifted his tail and let three or four big turds plop to the ground, and Pete had a sudden flashback of the kids stringing a net in the pasture and playing badminton. Half the point of their game was to hit the birdie in such a way that the opponent couldn’t avoid stepping in manure to return the volley. As if that wasn’t hard enough, they usually played after dinner as twilight fell so they could barely see the piles they were dancing to avoid. They hooted and hollered whenever someone misstepped, and up on the patio, Pete and Leigh used to laugh, too, to hear it. The sound of the kids’ laughter ringing out through the pasture was a sound he’d always associate with summer nights. That and the sound of the hose running afterward to wash off their shoes.

  Another flashback, to the first time he brought Kip and Mia here. They kept their kids apart while they were dating—Leigh knew too many children who got to know a prospective brother and sister, learned to share toys and meals and often bedrooms, only to watch them leave after a month or a year when things didn’t work out. No child should have to have an ex-sibling, she said. So they waited until they knew it was forever and arranged a big get-to-know-each-other dinner for the kids. It was late winter but unseasonably warm so they grilled out on the patio. Mia at five was desperately shy around strangers, especially those loud, lumbering, fifteen-year-old giants, so Leigh took her under her wing. She sat next to her at dinner and made ketchup smiley faces on her plate and stuck five candles in her cupcake to make up for all the birthdays she’d missed. By the time dessert was over, Mia was in her lap and Leigh was reading her one book after another by the fading light of the day. That was when the twins set up the badminton net in the pasture. Chrissy was yanking on her barn boots to play the first set when she looked up at Kip and suddenly clapped her hands in delight. Hey! she cried. We don’t have to take turns anymore! Now we can play teams! Three players were now four, and the world became perfect in her eyes.

  The horses ambled away and so did he. He sat on the glider on the patio and watched the light fade from their garden. Their house, their home, and he wanted it back, all of it. The perfect life they’d built here. It still could happen, he told himself. Kip would soon be done with school. He could go stay with Karen, and Pete could move home. Live civilized again. End the campout and sleep on a real bed. With Leigh.

  Except that Kip was barely tolerating his Sunday visits to his mom’s. There was no way he could live there full-time, and who would help him deal with Shelby and the case? Who would keep the lid on his wild mood swings? Not Karen and sure as hell not Gary. As for Pete moving back home— He looked up at the windows of the house, every one of them black and forbidding as dusk fell. Leigh wouldn’t even talk to him on the phone for more than thirty seconds. She wasn’t going to throw the doors open for him now.

  He put his head in his hands. Kip was nearly grown and out of the nest. Leigh was the one Pete was supposed to be spending the rest of his life with. Forsaking all others, their wedding vows said. But when it came down to it, he chose Kip. Yes, the kid was having the worst time of his life, but, God, so was Leigh. Blood will out, his mother had said acidly when he told her a little of their situation, and maybe that was all it came down to. Despite a thousand years of civilization, the tribal mentality still prevailed.

  He went back in the kitchen for Shep, but the dog didn’t want to go. He jumped up on the window seat and circled it three times and flopped down with a sigh. Pete called him and snapped his fingers and even hooked a hand in his collar and gave a tug. But Shep wouldn’t budge. “Have it your way,” he said.

  Back in the truck he took a moment to text Leigh so she wouldn’t be startled when she got back. Shep’s in the kitchen, he typed. He didn’t want to leave home.

  Neither did I, he added, but the words glowed too brightly on the screen, and he hit the back arrow until they disappeared.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  A photograph of the Reverend Brooks Brothers appeared on a poster outside the auditorium, along with his actual name: STEPHEN H. KENDALL, PHD, DD. Below that was the title of tonight’s lecture: “Truth and Consequences: The Ethics of Lying.” The university had billed the event differently on its website. “The Morality of Affluence, or How Much Is Too Much?” was the advertised title. There must have been a late-breaking change, after the posters were printed. The original title still appeared in spectral letters behind the plastered-on new one.

  Leigh had googled Stephen Kendall only to find out where his church was, but it turned out he was on sabbatical from his parish in Chevy Chase and was now teaching Ethics at George Washington. The university was in summer recess, but this was a free lecture open to the public. Waiting in line for the doors to open were the usual white-haired retirees who tended to fill the seats of such lectures, but also businessmen straight from the office, women like Leigh who’d overdressed for the occa
sion, and a surprising number of young people.

  One of them stood ahead of Leigh in line, a girl in shorts and sandals with a streak of bright turquoise through her dark hair. She was pulling a rollaboard suitcase behind her as they inched toward the door. “Sorry,” she yelped when it bumped against Leigh’s foot. “I didn’t have time to drop this off at my hotel.”

  “You’re from out of town?”

  The girl slid her sunglasses on top of her head. “I’m home in Boston for the summer. But when I heard Professor Kendall was speaking tonight, I dropped everything and hopped on the Acela.”

  “You know him?”

  The sunglasses bounced with the vigor of her nod. “I had him for Ethics in the Online World last semester. But I knew about him before that. I mean, he’s like a total rock star.”

  Leigh smiled. “Not something you hear very often about a minister.”

  “Oh, he’s a lot more than that. He’s an ethicist and a philosopher—I don’t know—a thinker, you know? Like Emerson. Or Voltaire.”

  “Wow.” Leigh blinked and laughed.

  “Seriously. And the cool thing is, he’s such an awesome dude. Good-natured and really funny sometimes. It’s amazing, considering.” The girl lowered her voice, her eyes gone wide. “You know about his son?”

  Leigh had to look away as she nodded. She’d devoured the story after she found it online. Two years ago Reverend Kendall’s son Andrew was shot to death in the family home when he came home late one night and stumbled in on a burglary in progress. His parents were asleep upstairs, and they ran down to find the burglar gone and Andy on the floor in a pool of blood. He was only twenty-three.

  Leigh felt sick with shame to think of it. The way she carried on that day in Stephen’s library, sobbing and wailing as if she were the only parent in the world to ever suffer the loss of a child. She didn’t know how he kept himself from screaming at her to pull her head out of her ass and see that others had endured horrors worse than hers. Instead he offered her tea and kind words and the first bit of comfort she’d felt since Chrissy’s death. “I don’t know how he goes on,” she said to the girl in line.