Free What Burns Away by Melissa Falcon Field

children we had been, and at fourteen years old, we turned inside ourselves.
    The girls sitting in the folding chairs in front of me no longer held hands and grinned at each other in excited anticipation. Each person in that room dived solo into grief. No one ate their pizza slices, and our ice cream melted in the plastic bowls in the back of the auditorium as a teary-eyed Mr. Barnet rolled the AV equipment away.
    Ushered into our adulthood, we awaited Principal Jensen’s voice over the loudspeakers to announce what was already clear—Christa McAuliffe, the thirty-seven-year-old mother of two, who bore a likeness to our own mothers, would not be teaching three classes from outer space. Something had gone terribly wrong.
    We were let out of school early, and I waited for my mom to pick me up, trying to understand how I could ever let go of that dream, the moment I had waited for all year. I asked myself if there were any guarantees, any promises that our parents or NASA or even President Reagan could keep. And I clearly remember deciding then that if he asked, I would give myself to Dean.
    â€¢ • •
    I don’t remember her doing this any other time, but that afternoon of the Challenger disaster, my mother left her job as an emergency room nurse at Hartford Hospital early to pick up Kara and me from our schools. Out front of my high school, Kara waved apathetically from the front window of Mom’s station wagon, signaling their arrival.
    Both my sister’s and my mother’s eyes were red from crying, yet their duplicate beauty was still intact. Kara’s and Mom’s full lips quivered; their mouths were downturned. I got in back and we drove in silence. In the rearview mirror, I watched my mother blink away the tears that streaked her eye makeup and soaked her face. Behind me, grocery bags rustled as we made the sharp turns leading up to our driveway.
    Parked in front of our house were my Uncle G’s plumbing van and my dad’s friend Rex’s battered Jeep with its notorious bumper sticker: Draft Beer, Not Boys .
    Inside, the guys played cards—their weekly Tuesday afternoon poker match, something my father had organized with his friends who were also out of work, either by choice like my uncle or because they were walking the picket line like Dad and Rex. Sometimes other neighborhood guys joined them, but most often it was just Dad, Rex, and Uncle G who sat around the table, all of them going through various strings of jobs, unemployed on and off for years. The game gave their calendars some consistency and was one they had played since high school, never missing a week, except for a couple of years after their numbers were called for the Vietnam draft.
    My father was the only one who served in that war. Uncle G, my mother’s brother—or, as my dad called him, “the Lucky Fuckin’ Mick”—had failed his physical examination due to the Ménière’s disease he blamed every time he got drunk and fell down. “And Rex dodged the whole mess,” Dad explained to us once, “to marry Marian, his first wife, the prettiest of the three, moving with her up to godforsaken Halifax, Canada, to make candles and sell salt cod.” But following my father’s and Rex’s return after those nearly two years away, the three amigos all picked up where they left off and the games resumed at our house.
    That January afternoon, in lieu of the poker chips they could not find, the men used my mother’s sea glass as their markers. Mom stored her prized collection in giant mason jars sorted by colors—one filled with just the rare blues, another with greens, a jar for whites, one for the browns, and then the most treasured, filled with pinks and broken pieces of antique pottery.
    â€œWhat the hell are you doing?” Mom asked my father when she stepped in from the cold and up to the table with bags full of groceries. Her mouth was pinched.
    My