Chapter 9: Ashes

I took the stairs in three jumps.

The workroom was full of smoke to the height of my shoulders. Under it, the storeroom doorway was a square of solid orange.

Kitto was in it.

He had both arms around my mother's industrial machine, the big Consew on its iron table.

He was dragging it backward out of the fire.

"Kitto! Leave it!"

"It's your mother's!"

The table legs screamed on the floorboards.

I grabbed one end. The iron was so hot it bit through my apron.

Together we hauled it across the workroom and out the front door onto the sidewalk.

Kitto let go and looked at his hands.

The palms were red and white and wrong.

"Huh," he said, in a small, surprised voice, and sat down on the curb.

The volunteer trucks came up Fifth Street four minutes later.

By then, half the street was out on its porches in bathrobes, and the storeroom window had blown out into the alley.

I stood on the sidewalk next to Kitto with his hands wrapped in my wet apron.

I watched my shop burn from the back.

I couldn't do anything about it, so I watched numbly.

Eighty robes on the racks.

Six bolts of charcoal wool, delivered Friday.

My mother's dress form.

The firemen had it out by three. The front of the shop was smoke-black and soaked. The back was gone.

The doctor came in his own car and unrolled the apron from Kitto's hands.

"Second degree, both palms," he said. "You'll heal in four days, being what you are. Don't be stupid in the meantime."

"I'm never stupid," Kitto said.

"You pulled a hot sewing machine out of a fire."

"That was brave. Totally different category."

By four, the crowd on Fifth Street had a theory.

I heard it start somewhere behind me.

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