Chapter 12: The Jacket

The smoke alarm went off at eight in the morning.

I ran downstairs and found Roddy in my kitchen fanning it with a dish towel and Myra holding a frying pan out the back door.

"Nobody panic," Roddy said. "It's a technique."

"It's a fire," Myra said.

"It's a blackened pancake. People pay extra for blackened."

"That's fish, you idiot."

Torrey was on my couch where we'd put him at midnight, under my grandmother's quilt, with a pillow under his shoulder.

He was awake. He was laughing silently, holding his side so it wouldn't hurt.

The wound was pink and closed over now, puckered.

It would scar, because silver always does.

"Don't encourage them," I said.

"I'm not doing anything."

"Your face is doing something."

I went to stand by the couch.

I didn't mean to put my hand on his hair, but it went there.

He leaned into it a little.

In the kitchen, Myra and Roddy had stopped arguing and were both very busy not looking at us.

The second batch of pancakes was only a little black.

We ate them at my kitchen table with half a bottle of syrup each.

Roddy made Torrey sit at the head because he was wounded, and then cut his pancakes for him like a child, until Torrey threw a fork at him.

"You missed," Roddy said.

"I'm left-handed and somebody shot my left side."

"Excuses."

Myra laughed so hard she snorted syrup.

Roddy looked at her.

I sat there with my coffee and watched the three of them, and something in my chest that had been clenched for two years let go a little.

My father would have liked a full, noisy table like this.

I hadn't let anyone cook in this kitchen since the funeral.

After breakfast Torrey asked me to sit on the floor by the couch.

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