Free Fireworks Over Toccoa by Jeffrey Stepakoff Page B

she’d certainly never seen someone make it with such care. Her father was demanding about his coffee. Rationing be damned, there was always Stewarts coffee in the Davis household. But as far as Lily could remember, she had never once seen her father make it. As far as she could remember, she had never seen anyone, male or female, make coffee this passionately. That was the word for Jake. “Passionate.” Everything Jake Russo did, everything about him, was like that. Fireworks, risotto, coffee, the music he chose, the words he used, the way he moved in those jeans, keenly, purposefully. His touch on her leg, the way he blew on her knee. The girls in town would be so attracted to him.
    Or would they? Would they understand him and see what she saw? Or would they think he was just quiet and strange and lonely? He was all that, of course. But those things only contributed to what she found so interesting about him. He was certainly very different from most of the boys she grew up with and knew.
    Where did he sleep? In the small overhead cab of the truck or outside, under the stars? She had seen sleeping bags in the back of the truck. Yes, there was more than one. What did that mean? Who was the other one for? Her mind wandered freely.
    He would meet someone. Eventually. And in ways big and small that other woman would receive the totality of his nature, his intensity, sensitivity, ability to focus all of himself on a woman as though understanding her and knowing her and feeling what she was feeling was the most important thing there was. That he was going to sweep a woman away, Lily was certain, and it made her content inside to know and think about, that he would not be alone, and that someone else would be so deeply connected to him and share her life with him, but the more Lily knew it, the more it also made her a little sad. More than a little, perhaps. It was wrong to feel that way, she told herself. But there it was. There it was. As plain as the waxing gibbous moon glowing above them. There it was, clear as that.
    It seemed to have gotten warmer, stickier. Perhaps it was the coffee. Lily felt the slip under her dress clinging to her body. She tugged on the top of her dress, to let a little more air onto her skin. As she moved her head to inspect the top buttons, something caught her eye in the southwestern sky. She pointed to it.
    “A shooting star!”
    Though Jake was looking up, he just stared, not seeing it, and it was gone.
    “It was right there, where you were looking, just under Cassiopeia.”
    “I love the stars, I really do. But, honestly, when I look up like this, I don’t see them.”
    “What do you see?”
    “A blank slate.”
    Lily looked up, then back at him, not understanding.
    Jake thought for a moment, then he handed her his notebook. “Here. This is what I see.”
    She looked at it, confused, and started reading what looked like a recipe of some sort.
    “‘Sixty-five ounces BP plus fifty ounces magnesium.’”
    “Sixty-five ounces of black powder,” Jake explained. “It’s a precise mixture of sulphur, charcoal, and saltpeter. That’s the lifting charge. A big one. It’ll give a strong bang to kick things off. The shell pops out of the mortar, flies high and fast into the sky, five thousand meters up, leaving a comet trail of flittering white sparks. That’s the magnesium.”
    Lily was fascinated, realizing that she was looking at the handwritten formula for a firework. She continued reading. “‘Ten BP, one hundred stars—strontium carbonate.’”
    “First break explodes, boom , red stars shoot across the sky in a perfect sphere twenty-five hundred meters across.”
    “‘Twenty BP, two hundred stars—barium chlorate.’”
    “Second break, boom , green stars, like jade and emeralds, twice as many, five thousand meters across.”
    “‘Thirty BP, three hundred stars—sodium oxalate, five-sec. fuse…’”
    “There’s a time-delay fuse, three, two, one, third break, boom!