How to Start a Fire (15 page)

Sarah picked up the phone and dialed the number.

“Is there a Kate there? Hi, I’m a bartender at Pete’s Emerald. It’s on Pacific Avenue and Water Street. You should pick up your friend Anna. She’s had a few and, uh, is currently keeping some questionable company.”

Anna’s plan to drink her studies into oblivion had backfired. Her final exam clung to her like a remora. She exhausted the disguised man as she droned on explaining organic chemistry to him, though she could barely explain it to herself anymore. His eyes darted about the room in search of another diversion.

Kate arrived half an hour later. When Anna saw her, she had a sudden recollection of a series of mnemonics that Kate had contrived to help her on an anatomy test. Anna had no knack for mnemonics, so she’d gladly relinquished the job. Kate dove into the assignment with great aplomb, but Anna managed to recall them only because of their sheer preposterousness.

“Sammy Likes Taking Paul’s Teeth To Charlie’s House. Scaphoid, lunate, triquetrum, pisiform, trapezium, trapezoid, capitate, hamate.

“Tom Creates Nuclear Missiles Inside Locust Caves. Talus, calcaneus, navicular, medial cuneiform, intermediate cuneiform, lateral cuneiform, cuboid.”

The disguised man wrapped his arm around her waist and whispered in sour-beef-and-cheap-beer breath, “Shut the fuck up.”

“I can’t,” Anna whispered back. She couldn’t.

Kate stood in front of the table with her arms folded in disappointment. “Did you come here right after the test?”

“Hello, little girl,” the disguised man said.

“I thought I told you not to talk to strangers,” Kate said to Anna.

“Why don’t you take a seat, sweetheart?”

“Why don’t you take a hike, mister?” Kate said. She was usually incapable of that kind of bold retort but was buoyed by the public space and Anna’s presence, as if Kate could somehow own part of Anna’s powerful persona when that part was missing from Anna herself. Not unlike the way atoms share electrons.

“You don’t have to be like that,” the man said in a sly, reptilian voice.

Sarah watched the proceedings cautiously. The disguised man was a regular. Never caused any trouble. But men and booze and someone interfering with a potential fuck were a combustible mixture. Sarah finished wiping dishwasher spots off a glass and approached the trio.

“I think this one has had enough,” she said.

“I think she’d like to stay for another round,” the disguised man said.

“Yes! One more round,” Anna slurred.

“I’m afraid I’m going to have to refuse service,” Sarah said.

A guy in denim and layers of cotton and polyester with carefully coifed bedhead who appeared to be somebody important (at least in the hierarchy of Pete’s Emerald) entered the bar. He approached the tense congregation, took one look at Anna, and said, “Get her out of here.”

Kate helped Anna to her feet. Anna broke free and cut a switchback to the door, then shouted “Serpentine!” in a weak Peter Falk impression. “I want to see that movie again,” she said to no one in particular.

Sarah and Kate followed Anna outside in a straight line.

“Where’s your car?” Sarah asked.

“What car?” Kate said.

Ten minutes later, Kate and Sarah loaded Anna into a pristine 1972 charcoal-gray Mercedes two-door. Anna was encouraged to hang her head out of the window like a dog on a road trip.

“Don’t even think about vomiting.” Sarah put the key in the ignition and started the car. She adjusted the seat, turned the windshield wipers on and off, and pulled onto the road.

“Thank you,” Kate said. “That was going to be one long walk home.”

“You couldn’t borrow a car?”

“I could. But I couldn’t drive it.”

“How do you live in California without knowing how to drive?”

“Buses. And hitching rides. It’s easier than you’d think, and I don’t have the responsibility of a vehicle.”

“You should learn how to drive,” Sarah Lake said.

“That’s what people tell me.”

“Does your friend always drink like that?” Sarah asked.

“It’s a little early in the day for her. At least, it was when she got started. But it’s finals week. She hasn’t been herself lately.”

Sarah and Kate propped Anna’s arms over their shoulders, walked her through the front door and up the stairs to her bedroom, tossed her on the bed, and tipped her onto her side. Kate removed Anna’s shoes and socks and threw a blanket over her. Later, Kate would force her to consume three glasses of water, a liter of Gatorade, and four slices of toast. But for now she let Anna sleep.

Kate walked the Good Samaritan to the door and said, “If you ever need anything, you know where to find us.”

The next day, accompanied by a wicked hangover, Anna flew back east for a short visit with her family. Colin had a new girlfriend to be vetted; she was the same as all the other girlfriends, Anna thought after she met her. Over dinner one night at the Union Oyster House, Anna said, “Does Pet Era mean anything to you?” She turned away from her parents’ blank look to her brother and his date. The woman’s name she would remember as Tanya, but really it was Anya.

“No,” Colin said, sucking down his sixth shuck of the night.

“Is it a band?” Anna asked.

“I don’t know. Did you look it up on the Internet?”

“It takes forever. Nothing came up but pet stores.”

“Maybe it is a pet store,” Colin said.

“Why would I write the name of a pet store on my arm?” Anna said.

“Can we please change the subject,” Lena said, which brought all conversation to a halt.

“You said if I ever needed anything,” Sarah said, standing in the doorway of the High Street house on a Saturday night. Kate was home alone and had had no plans until Sarah arrived.

An hour later, Kate was perched on a fire escape outside the window of Sarah’s apartment building, the center block of three neglected brick squares. Laundry hung on lines stretching to the next building, and television noise vied for airspace, creating a cacophony of jingles, laugh tracks, and screams.

“What happened to your key?” Kate asked.

“I’ve got it somewhere,” Sarah said from inside the apartment. She leaned her head out the window and passed a brown grocery bag brimming with clothes to Kate.

“This would be a lot easier if you found your key.”

“Not really. The key doesn’t work.”

“Huh?”

“Manager changed the locks. Asshole.”

“Why?”

“I stopped paying rent when I saw the mouse.”

“I see.”

“Do you want to come inside? I think the gas is still on. I can make you a cup of tea while I’m packing.”

Kate could hear the three admonishments her
deda
had repeated in broken English many times over the course of ten years. “Tree tings you remember: One, you a citizen, you vote. Two, don’t vaste your money on nonsense. Tree, don’t break laws. American prisons like summer camp compared to my country, but you still shouldn’t break laws.”

“I guess I’ll just stay out here,” Kate said.

Sarah dropped a suitcase and five grocery bags off the fire escape. She climbed down after Kate. They gathered Sarah’s most valued possessions and lugged them in the shadows to a late-model Cadillac with fuzzy dice and a pine-tree air freshener hanging from the rearview mirror.

“What happened to your other car, the Mercedes?” Kate asked.

“That wasn’t my car.”

The High Street house was empty when Kate and Sarah got there. George had a date with a man who washed and waxed his Porsche in their driveway every weekend. Kate never bothered to learn his name. She called him Spyder, after his car.

Kate found a bottle of bourbon that she had hidden from Anna pre- finals. She poured Sarah a double on ice (what Anna drank) and two fingers for herself (her
deda
’s allotted nightcap).

Over the course of the evening, as they drank and Sarah created a decent pasta dish culled from canned and packaged goods, Kate heard the
Reader’s Digest
version of Sarah’s life—that obligatory download of information that happens when two strangers are in a confined space.

Sarah had been raised in the foster-care system in Oakland, California, her father unknown, her mother dead of a drug overdose when Sarah was eight. A string of households followed, ranked from acceptable to terrifying; some molestation was mentioned in passing, and a few brushes with the law (nothing too serious, theft mostly); she spent some time in juvie and then was emancipated from the state. Homeless for a year. Then she found a job waiting tables, got an apartment, quit smoking pot all day long, and met her girlfriend. She and Sonia had moved to Humboldt County six months ago. They broke up a month after they arrived. Sonia fell in love with someone else. Sarah hitched a ride to Santa Cruz, talked her way into the Pete’s Emerald job and an apartment without a security deposit, and she’d been there ever since.

Kate was certain her life paled by comparison, but she provided the brushstrokes of it anyway. She told Sarah about her parents’ deaths and about being raised by her
deda.
She talked about her plans to take over the diner, a goal Sarah found far more reasonable than Anna or George did. And she mentioned her current obsession: nineteenth-century prison slang.

“It was called flash language,” Kate said.

“Huh. Give me an example,” said Sarah.

“There are three different words that all mean ‘shoes.’
Crabshells, hopper-dockers
, and
stamps.
My favorite word for ‘shirt’ is
flesh bag.
The slang for ‘tanked’ is
floored
, like on the floor. Also, if I handed you a knife and told you to cheese it, that meant stow it.”

Kate talked about flash language for another ten minutes, until it became clear her audience was bored. Sarah asked about the missing roommates.

“What’s Anna like when she’s not floored?”

“Anna always tries to make things bigger, more exciting than they are. She can turn a trip to the grocery store into an event. That can sometimes get old. But she also makes you do things you’d never think of doing.”

“And George?”

“George has your back. I was at this party off campus and this guy was bothering me, asking for my ID, calling me a little girl. He was standing way too close, breathing his vile beer breath on me, and I kept telling him to back off but he wouldn’t listen. George came over, told him to step away. He didn’t. She warned him one more time, didn’t really wait for it to register, and then punched him in the nose. Hurt her hand and couldn’t play basketball for a week. She’s a regular flibbing gloak. That means ‘pugilist.’”

Kate and Sarah ate dinner and drank and then Kate gave her a brief tour of the house. Sarah lingered in rooms and opened cupboards as if she were surveying real estate for purchase. It was then that Sarah found the enormous walk-in closet in the entryway. Five minutes later, they were negotiating a deal. Kate didn’t see a downside. They used the closet only for coats, and Kate had always thought it would make a nice bedroom. Kate’s cut of the two hundred dollars a month was enough to feed her for two weeks and two days, if she didn’t go out to dinner.

Sarah had been living in the closet for three days before George noticed she had a new roommate. This was the argument that Kate presented to Anna once she returned home to play tiebreaker.

Anna, weary from the six-hour flight and the seventy-two hours with her family, was not unmoved by the fact that Sarah had saved her from the disguised man in the bar or that she had grown up in the foster-care system or that she had done time.

“She goes or I go,” George said.

“Sorry, Kate,” Anna said. “Give her three days to find another place.”

Kate shot dagger eyes at George, who returned the look with an icy stare.

“Do you want me to tell her?” Anna asked.

“No,” Kate said. “I’ll do it.”

Kate walked the 1.8 miles to Pete’s Emerald. Behind the counter was a man who looked like a Pete, or like the kind of guy who opened a bar with his name on it.

“Is Sarah working tonight?”

The man Kate believed to be Pete shook his head and chuckled grimly. He raised an eyebrow and revealed his right incisor with a snarl. “Nope. She’s not working tonight or any other night.”

“Did you fire her?”

“What’s it to you, sweetheart?”

“She was living with me,” Kate said.

“Well, I’d check my silverware drawers if I were you.”

“Excuse me?”

“She cleaned out the cash register two nights ago. Haven’t seen her since.”

As Kate ran home in the rain, she thought that this would be a really good time to know how to drive. Once inside, she tracked water through the hallway and opened the closet. It was empty except for a sleeping bag rolled up in a tight fist in the corner. On the floor was an old weathered postcard. A standard shot of the Golden Gate Bridge.

Kate flipped over the card and read the single line written in rushed script.

I was never one for goodbyes.

SL

Boston, Massachusetts

“Hello, darling. Where have you been hiding?” Hunter Stevens III asked as he parked himself in a silver Chiavari chair next to Anna.

“In plain view,” Anna said. She was hard to miss, she thought, dressed in coral pink punctuating a room decorated in white and silver.

“What are you doing later?” Hunter asked.

“I suppose I’ll get another drink,” Anna said, staring down at her empty glass.

“And then what?” Hunter asked.

“Then . . . then I’m getting out of this fucking dress,” Anna said.

“If you need any help, let me know.”

Anna was thinking that his parents had named him perfectly. Then she was quietly calculating how many IIIs were attending her brother’s wedding. The percentage was well above average even for a tony Boston affair.

“I’ll do that,” Anna said dryly. A few lines of small talk with Hunter were all that Anna could stomach. She wobbled over to the bar, cursing the mandatory heels and yanking up on her strapless bridesmaid’s dress. The bust was tailored for manufactured breasts, and Anna spent much of the night readjusting, at first privately, then publicly, as the booze untied the already loose knot on her social graces.