Free Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles by Ron Currie Jr. Page B

‘Rocky Mountain High,’ and so on. The place was jammed with a mix of yuppies and backward-ball-capped college types, but we lucked in to two seats at the bar. We talked and laughed and drank. After a while I suggested I was ready to switch from beer to scotch, and Emma decided to join me, somewhat reluctantly, but when she ordered a glass of Macallan I changed tack without really knowing why, and asked for a Guinness.
    She punched me on the arm.
    Near closing Emma got a text from a friend saying there was a fire in her neighborhood, very near her house, even possibly—the friend hated to say it because she didn’t want to freak her out for no reason—
at
her house. The friend couldn’t be sure; they had the block cordoned off, but damned if it wasn’t awfully close.
    We paid our tab and started to walk back. Emma always strode with purpose, but now I had a hard time keeping up with her. It was cold, and she blew into her hands while I assured her, from half a pace behind, that these sorts of anecdotal reports were always overblown. As we got closer we saw a great horizontal column of white smoke drifting westward against the night sky, and she walked yet faster.
    I moved to grasp her hand, but she shook me off.
    I really wasn’t worried at all, even though I’d dropped my overnight bag at her house, and in that bag was my Mac, and on my Mac was every word I’d written for the last three years, including the novel I was six months late in delivering. I wasn’t worried, even though I’d always been too lazy to back up my files. I wasn’t worried, because I quite simply didn’t believe her house was on fire. I still suffered from the common delusion that big bad things didn’t happen to me or those I cared about, even though my father’s death was recent enough that some nights I woke with the smell of his diseased body in my nostrils.
    But that night Emma’s house was actually on fire. We turned the corner onto her street, and half a block up, three ladder trucks were raining hydrant water on the A-frame she’d bought with her husband back when they still believed in one another, the little A-frame where more recently I’d passed out reading Chekhov on the love seat in the sunny nook of the bedroom they’d shared, and she’d arrived home and woken me with a cool palm to my face, and I’d made her come right there on the floor, within sight of no fewer than five photographs from her wedding day, photographs she could not yet bring herself to box and closet. Beautiful prints, expensively framed in museum glass, meant to endure and pass through the houses of children and grandchildren, meant to last so long that the people who ended up possessing them would have little idea who Emma and her husband were. Now in the process of becoming ash.
    I had to grab her wrist to keep her from bolting up the street. There was nothing to be done, and even if she’d gotten past the cops standing guard at the end of the block the only thing it would have availed her was a better view of her life going up in flames. She fought me for a minute, but I gathered her in, and eventually she stopped struggling. She leaned against me and cried while I weathered a few moments of distant regret over my unfinished novel, now extremely unfinished. But then I found myself more interested in why Emma was crying: did she cry for the house itself, or for what it represented? And did it represent anything at all, really, except in its sudden absence?

A rson, according to the fire marshal’s office. A window on the ground floor had been pried open, the frame splintered and the lock snapped off. The investigator mentioned something about charring patterns underneath the carpet in the living room which indicated beyond a doubt that the fire had been set. The insurance company was eager to conduct an investigation of its own. Meanwhile, Emma moved into a hotel. She was in