Whole Latte Life (45 page)

No more fires, no more emergencies. First came the trip to Smith’s Hardware to buy fresh batteries for the smoke alarms and three additional alarms. No more chances. She bought fire escape ladders for each upstairs bedroom, something they’d always meant to do. Now, done. Yesterday she installed the new heavy-duty fireplace screen in front of the living room fireplace. No sparks could jump through that finely knit mesh. As if she can look into a fireplace and ever see anything good, anything comforting.

And every precaution breeds new threats, new sparks she imagines jumping from a heater or furnace or wick or stovetop or outlet, sparks jumping one step ahead of her, taunting her.

Like candles, there are so many candles in the house! Dozens of votives in the dining room alone, where they love to scatter them on the table for formal dinners.

And the potholders, near the stove. She takes them off the hook and shoves them deep in a drawer as she’s scouring off specks of stove grease.

While she’s at it, her mind spins a fire escape plan. A drill. They’ll schedule drills, even during the night, and practice until all the kids have it memorized, with different variables, where the fire is, alternate escapes, testing doors for heat, learning to crawl, Owen, checkpoints.

Part of that drill is that all the windows need to open easily in case someone has to climb out, if smoke is pouring into a bedroom from beneath the door. Towels, too, she can’t forget towels to stuff around the bottoms of the doors. So once the stove is cleaned, starting downstairs she unlocks and opens each window, moving through the kitchen, living room, family room, upstairs in the bedrooms, checking for ones that stick. She sprays a little oil and slides the window opened and closed repeatedly, greasing the tracks. Then she goes through the entire house again, starting downstairs and working her way through, double checking every window, just in case.

Afterward she pulls an armful of towels from the linen closet, dropping a couple in each room. They can be stored in a drawer, or beneath the beds, where they can be grabbed and stuffed into spaces where smoke gets in. Smoke spreads faster than fire. Smoke kills. They need some type of fire box, something to hold the ladders, towels, flashlights.

And the electrical outlets. Are any overloaded? Any wires frayed? She goes through each room, touching every outlet for warmth or anything out of order. Her hand cups each cord, sliding up to the stereo or clock radio or lamp.

A lamp’s light bulb can burn between two hundred twelve and nearly six hundred degrees. And cotton burns at four hundred eighty-two. She’s teaching herself. And in the girls’ closet, a pile of clothes towers on a shelf precariously close to a bare bulb fixture. She heaves the tower of clothes onto a bed.

A bed that can cause a fire. The majority of furniture fires involve upholstery or bedding. Jen’s bed is too close to the radiator. If cotton burns at four hundred eighty-two degrees, who knows what a cotton dust ruffle might heat up to, resting against a winter radiator. So she takes the headboard first and drags the bed away, then the foot, then the headboard, then the foot again until the bed is about four feet from the wall. She’ll have to rearrange the whole room now, moving Kat’s bed to a different angle, shifting one of the dressers to the other side. Jen wanted to Feng Shui anyway. They’ll do cool colors, blues and greens. Because there’s no other way. She has to keep them all safe. And so she pulls out the drawers from Kat’s dresser, sets them on her bed, and begins shoving the dresser, out of breath, a little at a time, across the room.

Tom walks into the house and sets down the grocery bags, looking up at the ceiling when the loud scraping noise comes again. And again. Rhythmically, but insistently.

“Juice, Daddy. Juice!”

He pulls a juicebox from the refrigerator and pushes the straw in, keeping an ear tuned to upstairs.

“Here you go, guy. Have a seat.” Owen kneels on a chair at the kitchen table while Tom starts unpacking, putting the gallon of milk in the fridge, setting the ketchup and salad dressing on the counter. But he stops then, noticing the microwave oven pulled out from the corner, leaving a full eight inches of clearance behind it. The toaster’s been repositioned too. And rubber gloves lie in the sink with wet sponges and dirty rags.

So something’s going on that has him scan the room. That’s when he sees bags of garbage shoved beneath the breakfast bar. One is filled with candles, votives and pillars and tapers, and on the top, two small packages of birthday candles. The other is stuffed with two electric blankets, balled up and shoved in. There’s a bag of newspapers and magazines, along with pieces of mail and the kids’ artwork.

And the scraping noise keeps coming. So he picks up Owen and first looks into the living room, noting the new fireplace screen. The dining room seems the same except for the lack of candles in the brass candlestick holders on the table and the empty glass votives in the hutch.

With a particularly loud bang coming from a bedroom above them, Owen looks up and holds on tight.

“Let’s go see what Mommy’s doing, okay guy?”

Owen keeps his eyes riveted on the ceiling and Tom decides, climbing the stairs, it’s better to leave him in his crib until he scopes out the situation.

“Here you go,” he says, handing him a couple books and a stuffed bear. “Daddy will be right back. You wait for me, okay?”

When his son starts to whine, Tom raises his finger to his mouth. “Shhh. I’ll go get Mommy. Shhhh.”

He leaves Owen standing in his crib and goes to Jen and Kat’s room, slowly pushing open the door. Sara Beth’s back is to him as she gets behind a dresser and heaves it a few feet, then moves to the other side and gives another shove. The room is a disaster, furniture randomly moved everywhere, piles of clothes falling off the beds, Jen’s stereo haphazardly sitting unplugged on a desk chair, curtains thrown up over the curtain rods.

“Sara,” he says, gently taking her arm, which she wrenches away.

“Don’t!” she warns, gasping a deep breath. Her hair hangs, clinging to her perspiring face, her hands are covered with oil and dirt, her clothes soiled and messy. Suddenly she goes for the head of Jen’s bed and tugs it, scraping the bed along the floor, nearly tripping on a sweater tangled at her feet.

Tom doesn’t say another word. He knows, watching Sara Beth’s devastation, that this isn’t about the fire. It took this long, this much time, for her to react to her loss. Finally, it’s for her mother. He walks up behind her and enfolds her, wrapping his arms around her tightly, locking her in his embrace, pressing against her back, tipping his head down over her shoulder, closing his eyes and resisting with all he’s got when she struggles fiercely, to break free.

“It’s your fault,” she cries. “It’s your fault she died.”

“What?” Tom asks, not loosening his hold. “What are you talking about?”

“Your car,” she whispers. “Your tank was empty, you were running late.” She inhales as though she can’t get air. “You had to go to court later.”

Tom releases her from his grip and turns her to face him. “And I drove your car so you could fill my tank and swap cars with me at work.”

“When I was supposed to meet my mother, Tom. We had plans that morning, and you didn’t care. You said my plans could wait, that you really needed your car to go to court. That Mom would wait for me.
What difference does an hour make?
Those were your exact words.”

And he knows then. He looks around the devastated room in which they stand; it is the devastation she lives. It is the hour the aneurysm struck.

It’s impossible to get Sara Beth on her cell, so Rachel calls their home on Sunday and gets Tom. They meet at the window booth at Whole Latte Life. He sits across from her, his hair freshly shorn in that buzz cut he won’t part with. She sees he’s still not used to the short trim, running his hand back through it as though it were longer.

“She’s tormented by it,” he says. “If she’d gotten to her mother’s earlier, she thinks she could’ve saved her. Called for help before it was too late.”

“So in her mind, it was your fault. For having her run around with the cars.”

Tom looks out the window, not answering.

“You couldn’t have known though. It was just bad timing.”

“What if she’s right?”

“Tom. She had a brain aneurysm. Once they strike…”

“I know, Rachel. I’ve tried telling her that.”

“Well tell me about the fire. How did it all happen?”

“We don’t know what started it yet. How much do you know?”

“Only what the paper told me. I tried calling Sara Beth, but she’s not picking up.”

“No.” Outside on The Green, the geranium blossoms hang heavy and red, the spikes tall behind them. “She won’t talk to anyone right now.”

“It’s no wonder.”

“I checked with her doctor. He’s concerned, especially with this coming so soon after the episode in New York.”

“Can we do anything for her?”

“He says to really listen to her. Be supportive, sympathetic, you know, all that stuff. But she’s completely shut down.”

“Not good, Tom.”

“No. Did you hear about our house?” The warmth outside makes its way through the window and he perspires, his tee shirt damp.

The waitress brings their coffees and Tom tells her about their futile hunt for a shop location. The town storefronts are booked solid. Addison is that kind of town, brimming with cottage industry shops: boutiques filled with sachets and twig wreaths and handmade birdhouses, nurseries blossoming with flats of flowers and baby vegetables, farmstands lined with native produce and honey, and the bookstore and ice cream parlor and vintage bridal shop.

“Tourists drive miles to stroll around this Green. I see them all the time, sitting at the benches, never leaving without a keepsake. That’s why we were sure her antique shop would do well. So we bought the big, old house. It seemed like the right choice with that two-room addition for her antiques, and it’s historical itself. The ambiance couldn’t be better.” He looks outside in the direction of the house while his fingers tightly pleat a napkin.

“I had no idea you got the house. Nothing survived the fire? A few pieces she could start up with?”

“Not enough to matter. A dozen or so pieces in the back. Some remnants of tables and chairs if you poke through the ash, but the rest is gone.”

“Was it insured?”

Tom shakes his head. “Antiques are tough. Their value changes, depending on different variables. An appraiser’s appointment was scheduled for next week.”

“Oh no.”

“And it’s all tied in with her mom, too, because she bought half that stuff before she died. Sara feels like she’s lost her all over again.” The strain shows in his tired eyes, his drawn face. “It’ll take a few more days for the Fire Marshal to know exactly how the fire ignited. But for Sara Beth to start over again? The God damn cards are stacked against her.”