Free The Fires by Rene Steinke

me.”
    “That’s not true.” I stared down at my hands, thinking about how to weave our talk into something easy and trivial like wallpaper or shoes. I tried not to think about what Mr. Schultz might have told her. She pulled the blanket up over her arms, so it made a tent over her body. “You’re a teacher, you know, not a hotel clerk.”
    “I won’t be there forever.” I looked away and saw that one of her pill bottles was overturned on the dresser. She shifted her weight in bed. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw her wince, but she hastily composed her face again. Her worry was fierce and persistent. Sometimes I thought I could hear it humming like a boiler. I searched her face, but I couldn’t tell how much she knew.
    A flannel nightgown thrown across the back of the bedstead slipped to the floor.
    “It’s okay,” she said. “Your father wasn’t a big talker, but he always knew the right thing to say.” She was shaking. “I never learned that.”
    I got up from the bed, went over to the dresser, and righted the overturned bottle of aspirin. Say it, I told myself, a wing batting at my throat. I turned, looked at her small, pert mouth. “Dr.
    Finch

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    says you’re not eating.” My father would have taken her to the doctor long ago. Even my grandfather, who was sometimes too distracted to notice a person’s appearance, would never have let her do this; he would have said fasting was something for movie stars and foreigners—it disrupted the natural cycle of things.
    She shrugged and looked out the window, half her face clear in the sunlight, half of it in shadows. She wrapped herself in a cape of silence.
    “What’s happened to your appetite?” I asked, sitting down on the bed again.
    She kept looking away out the window, blinking rapidly. I looked out the window, too, following her gaze into the field. I watched the wind comb through the corn leaves, a tractor inching in the distance, snaillike. I could hear her breathing. It had always been this way—she glowed with the pain she wouldn’t admit to, her power over me all the more radiant; in fact, it was brightest when she seemed on the edge of collapse.
    A few minutes later, I felt my hands turn numb beneath me and realized I’d shoved them under my legs, but I was afraid to stir. I wondered if I would ever be able to leave her. We were trapped in these poses for a long time, awkward and frozen like the glass swans joined at the neck on the curio shelf.
    T here was a spitting, lonely rain the morning I went to Marietta’s. Knocking on the door, I caught a glimpse between the living-room curtains of her regal silhouette. I waited. I thought she must not have heard, so I knocked again. She didn’t answer.
    Rain pricked my face. I put my ear to the door and heard a sound like a spoon stirring. A lock of damp hair fell into my eyes. I kicked at the base of the door until my toes ached.
    Finally she answered. Her hair was curled, her face made up, THE FIRES / 57
    but her eyes looked strangely large and glassy. “Ella, honey, come in,” she said, opening the door. “You want coffee?” She headed for the kitchen.
    I followed her and sat down at the table still damp from being wiped. She took the cups and saucers from the cabinet. “My mother’s not eating, Grandma. She fainted. That’s how she broke her ankle.”
    “I knew it,” she said, calmly pouring cream from a carton into a pitcher. “She’s upset, but she just has to eat. Maybe now she’s learned her lesson.” The coffee began to perk in the big silver pot.
    “I’ll bring her a casserole, something you just have to warm up in the oven. That will make it easier for her.”
    After my father died, Marietta’s thick casseroles accumulated in our refrigerator, plastic tubs and foil-covered plates of heavy, gelatinous food that my mother couldn’t keep down and reminded me of tumors. Marietta must have noticed we hardly ate any of it but just didn’t know what