Five Firemen Carried Me Out, and Not One Will Put Me Down novel · Chapter 13 of 24

Chapter 13: Fourteen Months

I got as far as the schoolhouse porch, with one boot laced and Gilles's spare coat over Normand's shirt.

It was snowing again, thin and dry, and the yard lamp turned every flake yellow.

The door banged behind me.

I did not have to turn around to count them.

"Jo," Gilles said.

"Not yet," I said.

"Please."

They came out onto the boards in their shorts and socks and stood in the cold without seeming to feel it.

Nobody spoke for a while.

The scanner inside crackled and went quiet, and I heard the new dispatcher correct his own mistake, badly, with the wrong cadence.

"Fourteen months," Ansel said again.

His voice was dry and slow, and under it was something I had never heard in him.

"I told you about my wife."

"I know," I said.

"In the grader," he said.

"You sat in my lap and let me tell you about the porch light.

"You let me say 'somebody told me to,' and it was you," he said.

"Ansel," I said.

"I wasn't done."

He took a step toward me and stopped, with his fists closed at his sides.

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