Those Who Favor Fire by Lauren Wolk (no david read aloud TXT) 📗

down at the linoleum on the kitchen floor. It was blue and white and very pretty. She sat down in a chair at the kitchen table and took off her shoes. Took off her socks. Put her bare feet flat on the kitchen floor so she could feel the cool linoleum. And finally began to pack.

Angela, too, had begun to pack. She was still serving odd, scanty meals to use up everything she had in stock. She wasn’t making any money, barely breaking even, but with her check on the way and the house Joe had given her outright, she was not worried. She and Dolly packed up everything in their apartment over the Kitchen in just a couple of days. They didn’t have much to pack, really. Then Angela borrowed a big pickup, Joe and Frank helped her with the fridge, the beds, the heavy things, and they both drove up north with her to unload everything at the farm.

When Angela got back to Belle Haven, exhausted and pleased, she loaded up the pickup with smaller, lighter cargo, and drove north once more, this time with Dolly.

“Now, don’t worry about a thing,” she told her mother after they’d carted the last boxes inside. “And don’t rush around trying to make everything perfect inside of a week. Rusty and I will be along soon. A few days more. We’ll be fine staying at Rachel’s house, and maybe, when we come up, we’ll be bringing her with us.”

Dolly took Angela in her arms. “Don’t stay too much longer, girl,” she said. “It’s not a good idea to tempt fate.”

“I know, Mother. I won’t.”

The next morning, Angela put a sign in the Kitchen’s front window. It said, CLOSING DAY. EVERYTHING’S ON THE HOUSE. She served lots of eggs and ham, canned peas, raisin bread, cranberry juice she’d brought in for Joe. Odd stuff. Some of the people eating it were crying.

When she’d had enough, Angela and Rusty gave everyone something to take home: a sack of flour, sugar, salt, pickles, whatever was left. Then she sent Rusty on ahead to Rachel’s house, watched him as he walked away.

“So that’s it,” she said, closing the door as night came on. She washed the dishes, dusted off the shelves in the pantry, scraped down the big grill, swept the floor, scrubbed the counter, set everything to rights before the bulldozers came in a day, a week, whenever they were through wrecking someone else’s home.

Then she went upstairs one last time and sat on a milk crate by a window, her cheek resting on the sill, and looked down into the street where she’d been walking the day her water broke, looked over toward Raccoon Creek where she’d taught Rusty how to skip rocks, looked up into the sky where the night’s stars had started shining, and said the first of her good-byes.

When Angela arrived at Rachel’s house, she was shivering with exhaustion.

“Where’s Rusty?” she asked as she came through the door.

“He’s out in the tree house with Joe,” Rachel muttered, shutting the door and switching on some lights.

“You been sitting here in the dark?”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“Boy, oh boy. I can see I’ve got my work cut out for me.”

“You think you’re going to bring sweetness and light back into my life, talk me into moving up to that farm with you? Save your breath.”

Angela sat down heavily in a big, mushy chair and pulled her knees up to her chest. “You got any brandy?” she asked.

When he came in through the back door, Rusty heard his mother and Rachel talking. He took off his jacket, meaning to join them, but then heard what Rachel was saying and stood where he was, listening.

“You all have too much faith in the man, and I can’t for the life of me figure out why. You’ve known him for a couple of years only, and he’s never done one single thing to prove he’s capable of making this thing work.”

“Come on, Rachel. You saw those houses. They’re there. They exist. What kind of proof are you talking about?”

“Since when can a person like Joe—who’s never had to work for a living, not really, or deal with the real world—in a single year build all those houses with all the proper permits, utilities, wells, you name it. One year. It’s impossible. It’ll be the middle of winter and some guy with a badge will show up on your doorstep and start asking you a lot of questions you just won’t have the answers to. And who knows where Joe will be by then?”

Rusty listened for his mother to come to Joe’s defense, but she did not.

“When I want to know something,” he said, walking into the room, “I ask. Why can’t you ask Joe about all this?”

When Rachel didn’t answer, Rusty said, “I asked Joe what it was like, building those houses, having all that money and being able to say, ‘I want you to build me a house here, and one over there, a bigger one, and a little cottage right in those birches there, and make them all beautiful.’ I thought he must have felt like a king.”

Rachel sat forward in her chair, opened her mouth to say something, but Rusty cut her off. “But he said, no, he didn’t feel like a king. He felt good, but mostly lucky. He realized that he’d need all kinds of permits and probably wouldn’t ever be able to get them, at least not in time to do what he wanted to do, as quickly as he wanted to do it. But when he called up some of the commissioners and told them what he wanted to do, as soon as he said, ‘Belle Haven,’ they jumped all over him trying to help. They made sure everything got done right. Imagine how happy they must have been when this strange guy with a zillion bucks walks in and says, ‘Hi. I want to settle a bunch of