Free Valley of Ashes by Cornelia Read Page A

asked.
    She nodded. “What I used to do. Horrible—you have to count up
everything
for depreciation. Down to the number of Q-tips and tampons.”
    I shook my head.
    We were in a west-facing large room at the back of the house, and Mimi turned off her flashlight. The place was filled with golden late-afternoon sunlight, and the sour chemical smell was much stronger.
    There were scummy puddles of water on the Saltillo-tile floor.
    The fire hadn’t been as intense in this part of the house—even I could tell that.
    There were more shards of glass everywhere. I wondered whether the windows had been bashed manually by firefighters, or just blown inward by the intense pressure of hose-water.
    Mimi had knelt down to take a sample of the oily water. “The worst part, you’ve gotta quantify personal things. Like those…”
    I turned toward where she was pointing, at a row of five antique quilts hanging along the wall behind us.
    Two were scorched, but even the ones still somewhat intact were sooty, waterlogged, and ruined.
    A sixth quilt had slid to the floor in a sorry heap after the pole that’d held it up pulled free of the wall.
    “Can I walk closer?” I yelled, pointing.
    Mimi nodded.
    I moved in, then crouched down next to the wet lump of fallen quilt.
    My pal Sophia had taken me to a domestic-textile exhibition back east the year before, so I knew what it was: a log-cabin pattern pieced from hundreds of “cigar silks”—narrow embroidered ribbons that various tobacco companies included with their premium brands as a come-on collectible, back in the teens.
    Someone must’ve hit this one with an arc of chemical foam, melting the fabric away in ragged splotches, revealing batting that was filthy and wet.
    I wondered how many hours of work had gone into the quilt, how many years invested in collecting the silks themselves. A quiet testament to some long-ago women’s communal work, ruined in one angry flash.
    I smoothed out a bunched flap of fabric tenderly with my gloved hands. The stitches were so tiny, so regular. All made by hand.
    When my thighs started to prickle, I got to my feet.
    “Oh, God, the books…, ” I said, looking at a floor-to-ceiling shelf of old volumes to my right, their leather spines swollen and bent.
    Mimi stepped up beside me.
    She squatted down, pointing toward a lower shelf. “See those?”
    The shelf housed a row of matching albums, bound in different colors of leather with names and dates embossed in gold on the spines.
    Rivulets of sooty water dripped to the floor when Mimi pulled two of these volumes out. The empty shelf had been painted white, the rowof books’ scalloped footprint now outlined in greasy black from the smoke.
    “Scrapbooks,” she said, peeling each one open in turn. “Good…”
    I looked over her shoulder. The pages were gummed together, the handwritten captions illegible.
    “Good?” I yelled. “Sad!”
    “Both. If the owners had set the fire, they’d probably have tried to sneak these out first.”
    “Oh! Good, then.”
    Mimi glanced at her own watch. “Babysitter?”
    We both stood up, and I followed her back down the hallway to the front door.
    “Want me to get you a ride?” she asked, when we were back out on the street and respirator-free.
    “I’m okay, thanks. My house is right down the hill and the child care place is on the way.”
    “You’re sure?”
    “We could throw the wagon in the back of a truck, but I don’t have car seats.”
    “Right,” she said, nodding. “It’s been a long time since I had to deal with all that. Forgot about the car seats.”
    “Thank you so much for letting me follow you around today,” I said, when we’d reached her truck. “What you do is really fascinating, and it’s a rare pleasure for me these days to hang out with grown-ups.”
    I meant that sincerely, wishing I had time to keep talking.
    I took off her gloves, then the suit, hood, and booties.
    “You can just throw everything in the bed,