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  But on the Thursday morning, I’d finished our bacon supply at four am, and someone had eaten that jar of congealed grease too, so as the sun climbed up the horizon I drove to 7-Eleven in my burgundy UC Denver sweatpants, on a mission!

  When the doctors had started keeping Lydia overnight, she’d sent me home each evening with nineteen-point to-do lists describing bedtime snacks, breakfasts, recess snacks, lunches, pyjamas, school clothes, dishes, garbage pickups, emptying the litter box when we’d still had the cat, relatives and friends I needed to keep in the loop, homework journals I needed to initial and shows I needed to confirm the TiVo had recorded even though it’d be too late to do anything if it hadn’t—I’d loved those lists of things I was perpetually qualified to accomplish, because otherwise in those days I’d been useless as a dead battery, capable only of nodding hopefully at the parade of doctors, squeezing Lydia’s fingers, swollen from chemo, and reassuringly ruffling the kids’ hair so often it had gone thin at the back. My heart had enjoyed a half-beat thrill whenever she’d slipped a scrawled-on gift-shop receipt into my hand.

  A tractor towing a load of hay rolled slowly across the intersection.

  With enough bacon, I could teach through most of the day before I drove out to Velouria to hopefully receive a single pragmatic answer to our manifold problems. I’d tried phoning the Dockside number that information had given me but hadn’t even heard an answering machine—it was the kind of business that didn’t need much contact with the public.

  “Truck from Fontaine should’ve been here yesterday morning,” muttered the green-smocked 7-Eleven clerk, gnawing a fingernail. “But we got no word from ’em whatsoever.”

  “Wait. You’re saying you’re sold out of bacon?”

  No grocery stores opened before nine so I drove home, stinging earlobe pressed between my fingertips, and ate the eggs and toast Deb put in front of me. I thanked her, kissed Josie and Ray on their clean little temples and walked out to the car while something yawned wide inside me.

  Halfway to Hoover High, my lane of traffic was brought to a stop by a flagman in a hard hat. They were laying a new sidewalk along the far side of the road and their machines cluttered the pavement. In the rearview mirror I watched the driver behind me dig patiently in her nose. I wasn’t running late, and after thirty seconds or a minute, tops, I knew they’d stop the oncoming traffic to give our lane its turn. But I got out of my car, in tie and pressed white shirt, and ran between the oncoming cars to get over to that new sidewalk.

  “Sir?” the flagman yelled. “Hey!”

  The sidewalk crew wore hard hats and fluorescent vests. The foreman stood with his back to me, hands on his hips, while the other five or six guys all kneeled, smoothing out the cement with their big flat trowels. With the heel of my shiny-black dress shoe I kicked the foreman in the small of his back. His head snapped back and his hard hat tumbled off as he squelched hands-first into the wet cement.

  The guys on their knees squinted up at me. One of the cars behind me honked its horn—Watch out, workers! Crazy guy!—right as the foreman sprang to his feet like he extricated himself from wet cement a hundred times a day, a sinewy-armed little guy with a half-cemented moustache. I threw a punch but he ducked underneath then shoved me hard in the chest, as if to say I don’t even want to fight you, asshole, I just want you the hell off my site. I stumbled backward, caught my feet in a coil of something and fell onto my back.

  I tried to sit back up but couldn’t somehow—felt like my right shoulder was stapled in place. I couldn’t figure out why, my eyes roamed around for some explanation. All the sidewalk guys were on their feet by then, hot for my blood, but they only walked as far as their foreman and stopped dead.

  “Aw, fuck,” one of them said.

  I finally looked at the shoulder itself. A six-inch hunk of rebar had been set into that particular piece of ground, and I’d fallen on it so that a good three inches of steel, streaked with that purple blood, protruded from my shirt front. I heard a lady in a car start hollering.

  “Don’t try to move,” the foreman said. “Call an ambulance, Jim.”

  “I’m all right,” I said.

  The problem was that I’d fallen straight onto the rod, and of course when you try to sit up from lying down your shoulders aren’t still parallel to the ground, it’s more like 45 degrees, and the rebar wasn’t going to pop out like that. So I wriggled my heels against my bum and I got my left shoulder under me, then pushed so my right shoulder went straight up. The muscle made a sucking noise as the rebar moved through it, but then I was finally unpinned and dropped onto my side in the dirt.

  “Aw, fuck!” the workers said, and knelt beside me.

  After a couple of deep breaths I didn’t feel too bad. Don’t let a school bus drive by, I thought, or Cam will call goddamn Kirsten McAvoy. I rolled over and climbed to my feet. I wasn’t even woozy, though my stomach grumbled. I smoothed down my tie.

  “I can’t apologize enough,” I told the men, then sucked back another long breath. “If I’ve put you out any expense, just let me know. My name’s Peter Giller, I work up at the high school.”

  They kept looking up and down between me and my long-lost rebar. The flagman was staring with his sign down at his knees so traffic wasn’t moving in either direction. I jogged across to my car. I’d left the engine running so I pulled straight out into the oncoming lane, mouthed a Sorry! to the twitching foreman and sped off toward school. Never even fastened my seatbelt!

  I parked behind the metal shop so I could go in through the cafeteria entrance. Mrs. Abel was by the oven, dolloping out a sheet’s worth of cookie dough, and I asked whether she might have a little bacon that I could come back and eat after homeroom—I didn’t have to tell her I preferred it burnt because that was the only way she cooked it. I grinned at her, full of hope, but she just stared back at me. A poster beside the cash register read we will be writing letters to urge congress to sponsor d. r. congo’s women & children as refugees, in the cafeteria after school thursday, the more the merrier this will save lives, questions? Grace – locker #174.

  “You can’t teach like that,” Mrs. Abel informed me.

  I looked down and saw that my white dress shirt—my only new one since Lydia had first been diagnosed—sported two gray handprints across the chest, a livid purple streak down one side like I’d been painted with a roller, and a small hole in the shoulder.

  “Sure I can.” I wiped my hair off my forehead. “What do these kids know?”

  So instead of cooking my bacon she had a hushed phone conversation until Mr. Vincent sauntered down the ramp from the office then walked me out toward my car.

  “This is stupid,” I said, centring my tie. “I can teach!”

  “Let’s just talk a minute.”

  “Let’s talk about the season—Week 15 against the Jets, what’s that going to be?”

  “No, just sit down here,” Cam growled.

  I sat in the passenger seat, the door hanging open while he stood beside the car and kicked pebbles across the pavement.

  “I’ve had phone calls from all of the parents,” he said, riffling a hand through his crewcut. “Halliday, Melloy, all of them telling me, ‘Ever since that trip to Velouria my kid’s been walking around like a zombie, knocking down the cat, cutting their feet with razor blades, blah, blah.’ All I can say is, ‘Well, medically they were given a clean bill of health, Mrs. Tits. Is there anything going on at home that might be a factor here?’ And you’d think they’d say ‘Screw you,’ but, no, they get off the phone toot sweet.”

  “Don’t herd us in with them,” I said. “Zombies haven’t got mental function. They drag themselves around looking for brains to eat. Shit, I can still think.” I tilted the seat back and put my feet on the dash. Clumps of concrete all over my shoes. “I just haven’t been in a good mood.”

  “So tell me why Amber—”

&
nbsp; “Poor old Amber’s arm fell off, sure, might be you could get the district health guys in here to tell you why that happened, but she’s still thinking, all right? ”

  “But just for argument’s sake,” said Cam, “how does a zombie know he’s not thinking? If he goes from eating macaroni and cheese one day to braaains the next, sure, he might notice a change in himself in that instance, but if the transformation takes six months, a year, well, people do change, right? He’s just picked up some new hobbies, that’s all. Altered his diet. It might take, say, a high school principal to tell the guy there’s a difference. This large-scale medical stuff is out of our sphere, nobody expects schools to address arms that go missing, but lapses in judgement do concern me. See my concern?”

  “Give me back my car keys,” I said.

  Cam squatted beside the open door.

  “Don’t take this the wrong way, Giller, but do you have a whole lot of friends?”

  “Thanks for noticing,” I said.

  “A-ha. Show off these higher mental functions and tell me why you’re crusted in blood and cement.”

  “They’re the lot of the common man, Mr. Vincent. One day you’ll be in them up to your waist. Hey, did you hear from this James Jones in the last couple of days?”

  He shook his head with furrowed brow, trying to look engaged.

  “He works for Penzler Industries,” I said, “that’s the parent company of that outfit in Velouria, and he was around here asking—”

  “I know them.” Cam got up, twisted to the left and cracked his back. “Saul from the board office called yesterday afternoon, said the lawyers for Penzler wanted contact information for everybody caught in the accident so they could start getting the wheels rolling on compensation. I pictured you and Ray and Josie at Disneyland and I said, ‘Hell, yes, Saul, don’t drag your feet—tell ’em what they need to know!’ ”

  I knew Cam was finally saying something important but I couldn’t take my eyes off the turquoise hatchback that was parking over by the fence. Kirsten McAvoy. Fake pearls and all.

  “Did you call Kirsten McAvoy to cover my classes?” I asked.

  “Listen, it isn’t your effed-up shirt that’s the problem.” Cam wiped his nose with a lily-white handkerchief. “It’s the state of mind that would allow you to wear that shirt into my school that’s the problem.”

  “Please just give me my car keys.”

  “Hold on. Kathleen’s been calling around to get you a ride.”

  I set my feet down on the parking lot and got out of the car. I felt tall!

  “You listen.” I jabbed Cam’s sternum with two fingers. “You run and get me a plate of bacon in the next thirty seconds or—”

  Meep-meep! Deb pulled up beside us in her red Corolla. Kirsten McAvoy clacked past on her turquoise pumps and thick ankles, scrapbooking binders clutched to her chest. She grinned at us, waving her car keys.

  Deb lowered her window.

  “Let’s get you cleaned up,” she said. “I turned on the tub, so we can’t dawdle.”

  “Thanks for coming down so quick,” said Cam. “Don’t let him near your brain.”

  “Oh, you know me better than that,” said Deb.

  At the first red light, Deb put her elbows on the steering wheel and looked sideways at me. She hadn’t put on her makeup yet so her eyelashes were invisible.

  “You know, I won’t be upset if you find a girlfriend,” she said. “I don’t know what she’ll think of me being underfoot, but the woman has to be out there somewhere.”

  “Are you crazy? Give it ten years.”

  “She’s out there somewhere.”

  She worked the clutch pedal, ready to go.

  “When you played football, Lyd always called you ‘Captain America.’ ”

  “Until my shoulder got torched,” I said. “Could barely write finals.”

  “I just remembered it because I thought you could go on one of those dating websites and call yourself that. ‘Captain America.’ ” The light changed and she turned left up our hill. “Are you still allowed to burn leaves? Somebody’s got a real bonfire.”

  A column of smoke billowed from the hill above us.

  Every time I’d seen a burning house, even on the news, I’d imagined the resident spotting the smoke from blocks away, driving closer and closer, the pit of his stomach knotting tighter, until he sees that, yes, it’s his own damn house.

  And when we pulled up to squint at flames licking the underside of my roof and smoke pouring out of the upstairs windows, my gut instinct was to blame Deb for leaving the bathtub running—because that can lead to significant property damage, right? Then I thought that the simple act of talking to Rob Aiken on the phone had made this happen. He’d made it sound like things were going to get worse. I already had my door open.

  “You dropped the kids at school, right?”

  “Of course they’re not in there!” Her seatbelt shot back over her shoulder. “For God’s sake!”

  Then sirens behind us—the fire department storming up the street like an invading army. I was already up the steps and at the front door, wondering how not having my keys somehow prevented me from getting through a locked door, while Deb pulled her car ahead a couple of houses to give the trucks room.

  A bearded guy with a bullhorn walked me off the porch as burning shingles started to drop onto the lawn. The firefighters hooked the pumper truck up to the hydrant across the street. I stood beside Deb on the sidewalk, feeling weak as foolscap from my teeth to my tailbone, while the column of black smoke rose so high that Cam and Kirsten and Mrs. Abel might’ve been watching it out the staff room window and shaking their heads at the horror of it all.

  “Anybody inside?” one of the men asked Deb.

  “I told them, the kids are at school. I—I only just stepped out five minutes ago.”

  “Any pets?” he asked.

  The kids had plenty of things they would have wanted saved—Roald Dahl, a cardboard box full of Josie’s flying horses, a Hot Wheels carrying case shaped like a wheel, the still-boxed pictures of their mom—all kept in rooms where flames had already consumed every molecule of oxygen. Credit cards melted down to bingo chips. At least Deb had pictures of Lydia on her mantel back in MacArthur.

  But there was one thing I figured I could save! I ran through the next-door neighbors’ yard all the way back into the alley, then in through our back gate and across our backyard. The siding bubbled beside my head but I reached underneath the stairs and pulled out that shovel my dad and I had used to bury Keister.

  A dimpled cop with a notepad was talking to Deb when I got back to the car. I stood beside them and watched the fire. Load-bearing beams collapsed on themselves in explosions of smouldering ash, but everything felt more right with that shovel in my hands. I choked back my compulsion to smash every windshield.

  “And this is Peter,” she said, nodding at me. “We only just got back to the house. He was at the high school before that.”

  The cop eyeballed my shirt. Besides dimples he had surprisingly bushy sideburns.

  “You need medical treatment, Mr. Giller?”

  “I’m all right,” I said.

  “Any connection between your, uh, injuries and this situation at the house, sir?”

  I shook my head. The cop frowned and scribbled in his notebook. The fire chief climbed out of his red station wagon and muttered to one of the firefighters, then he came over and muttered with the cop. I felt like biting their faces, but not in front of Deb.

  The roof crumbled into what had been our living room. The muscles down my arms flexed involuntarily. Man, the stuff a guy could rip apart if he were a house fire!

  “After school today I’m taking the kids back to MacArthur,” Deb said. “With their mom gone too, I’m sorry, but—you want to come buy them a change of clothes?”

  “Jes
us! You don’t have to take them all the way to—”

  “You come pick them up whenever you’re ready.” She folded her arms and leaned her hip against the car. “You sure as hell aren’t ready now.”

  “You—you think this my fault?”

  “I don’t know. That’s just the thing, I don’t know. And if those sweet kids are going to be in your care I have to be able to say, ‘No, Peter definitely had nothing to do with it.’ The extent of your parenting right now is—you need a little time, Peter, and I can give them a safe place for as long as that’s necessary.”

  Behind my shoulder, someone said, “Arson?”

  I twisted around.

  “Again?” the cop said.

  He and the fire chief glanced at me then went on talking in lower voices, but from the way his lips moved below his moustache, the chief was still saying arson.

  “Take me back to get my car,” I told Deb. “At least leave me with that.”

  I gave the cop my landlord’s contact information, said I’d be staying down at the Brennan Motel, then Deb and I went shopping for underpants and pyjamas and six new Choose Your Own Adventure books, like Josie and Ray would really feel those were a fair exchange as they were driven away from their friends and home.

  Lost everything you own? Choose from 23 different endings!

  Deb bought me a green-striped tennis shirt that I wore out of the store, then she dropped me and the shovel off beside my car. Purple blood had dried on the driver’s seat and even after I’d scrubbed it with a wet wipe there was a stain that looked like a pig balanced on its front legs. I found paper and a pen in the glove compartment and wrote:

  Mr. James Jones—What the fuck do you want from me?

  Peter Giller.

  Saul at the board office had provided names and addresses, according to Cam, and the next day the fire chief was on my lawn saying, “Arson.” At least I had the business card of the guy who’d burned my life down.