Free Burning House by Ann Beattie Page A

blood bubble, but of course children did that, not adults, and it was something men did, anyway. Then Holly met Ash, and for a while she was happy. It didn’tlast, though. I knew that there was trouble the day I went with Ash to pick berries from the scraggly blackberry bushes that grew around the crumbling foundation of what was once an old mansion. He was dropping them in his khaki cap, not caring that it would be stained forever.
    “Why is Holly pulling away from me?” he said.
    “Because of Peter,” I told him. “Because her husband’s going to win, and she knows she’s losing Peter.”
    “Holly and I could have a baby. She sees him. Her ex-husband isn’t trying to turn Peter against her, is he? I never noticed that.”
    “Ash,” I said. “She doesn’t have Peter.”
    He stopped picking berries. “You know what the two of you do? You condescend to me when you talk. I understand facts. Did it ever occur to either of you that there are other facts besides your facts?”
    The sun was beating down on the berries, on his sad face, the stained fingers—it looked as though he had been involved in something violent, when all he had been doing was carefully picking berries. The violence was all inside his head. He was going to Tennessee, to give her time to think. Time to think about whether she could concentrate on him again, spend less time brooding about Peter, have another baby—the baby he wanted. He was staring down, dejected. A black ant ran through the berries. Many ants. He tried to flick them out, but they were quick, and went to the bottom. “It’s so beautiful here in the summer, and she sits in the house—”
    “Ash,” I said to him. “What really matters to her is having Peter.”
    I always wondered if what I said made him decide for sure to go to Tennessee.
    Her brother, Todd, came for the last two weeks in August. He had always been suspicious of the men his sister loved, and he was suspicious of Ash. “He’s one of those smiling Southern boys you outgrow. They wear the same belts all their lives,” hesaid. But he loved Holly, and he tried to give impartial advice.
    “I know it’s sick,” Holly said to Todd, rocking with him on the back porch, “but our father’s dead and I’ve made you into the permission-giver, and I guess what I’m hoping is that you’ll tell me to go to Tennessee.”
    “You wouldn’t leave Peter if I told you to.”
    “What if I made a success of myself, and I could fly back to Boston all the time?”
    “It’s not what you want to hear,” he said, “but I remember when he was just learning to walk, and somebody took a picture of him with a flash, and he turned to you and he was blind. He was blind the way people get snowblind. I remember how the two of you felt your way toward each other—how you were both just arms and legs. You’re his mother.”
    “And I go to a shrink in Montpelier and everybody thinks I’m very fragile, don’t they?”
    “Ash sat with me on this porch and told me he wanted at least three children. Kids aren’t going to distract you from Peter. They’re just going to remind you of him. Don’t you remember when Georgia exploded that flash cube in his face and he turned around from the birthday cake like it had been a land mine? Vietnam. Fucking Vietnam.”
    He went into the house for iced tea, which he brought back to us on a heavy silver tray, one of those family heirlooms you can’t imagine owning but can’t imagine getting rid of. While he was gone, I said to Holly: “It’s twelve years later, and almost every day, he gets the war into the conversation. He went to Nebraska to keep punishing himself.”
    When we finished drinking our tea, Todd and I decided to go swimming. Holly was a little angry at Todd, and she stayed behind to throw pots with Percy Green. Percy Green was stoned, so he didn’t realize what he’d walked in on. “I pick up on something,” he said. “That marvelous creative energy.” He was wearing