I'm Done Being the Family Joke novel · Chapter 11 of 24

Chapter 11: Left Off

Cal's truck was already parked outside Peg's house when I pulled up on Tuesday.

He stood on the porch with his hat in his hands.

I walked up the steps and stopped in front of him.

"You knew something," I said. "And you held me anyway."

"I knew a piece of it," he said. "I didn't know whose. I didn't know it would be you who had to hear it."

"You should have told me."

"Yes."

He didn't defend himself, and I found I didn't have anything left to say.

Peg opened the door before either of us knocked.

She had set three cups on the kitchen table and put out the cedar box beside the sugar bowl.

"Sit down," she said. "Both of you."

We sat.

She stood at the end of the table with her hands folded.

"The night of the fire," she said, "you were nineteen and you closed the store at six. That's what you told everyone. Is it still what you remember?"

"I locked up and went home."

"Did you leave the space heater on?"

"I don't know." My voice came out thin. "Dad said I did. I couldn't remember, and he said that was the trouble with me."

Peg shut her eyes for a moment.

"You unplugged it," she said. "You did it every night of your life, and you did it that night. Russ walked through the office with the fire marshal the next morning, and the heater was cold and the cord was on the floor."

The kitchen clock ticked.

"I don't understand," I said.

"The fire didn't start in the office."

She put her hand on the lid of the cedar box.

"It started at the loading dock, in the big trash barrel by the back door. Daisy lit it."

I heard it, and I did not hear it.

"Daisy was fifteen," Peg went on. "The school had its Christmas concert that night, and she'd been handed a note from her teacher that said she was failing math. She was frightened of your father. She walked back to the store after the concert in her red velvet coat, climbed up onto the dock, and burned that note in the barrel with her lighter."

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