He picked up another one, silvery against the tan of his palm, and rolled it around. Wordlessly Bruce handed her the nail. “That looks pretty,” he said after a moment.
“What?”
He pointed to her head and Maggie put a hand up and felt the wreath of clover. She started to pull it off. “Don’t take it off,” he said. “It looks nice. My mother made those things for my sister when she was little.”
Maggie lowered her head again. Bruce’s mother had died when they were in fifth grade. She felt terrible because she suddenly remembered why Bruce would feel the world was topsy-turvy. “Who cooks dinner in your house?” Maggie finally said, without meaning to.
“The housekeeper,” Bruce said. “She cooks dinner and then she leaves. She’s not too good a cook. She makes hamburgers a lot.”
“I don’t know why I asked you that.”
“It’s okay. Everybody asks me stuff like that. I think people can’t figure out what it would be like to have a family that’s not like anybody else’s family.”
“I can,” Maggie said, and again she felt as though the words had slipped out.
“Why? You have the normalest family in the world. How would you feel if every time you went to church you could tell that people were pointing at you and saying ‘There’s the ones with no mother.’”
Maggie didn’t know what to say. Bruce picked up another nail. Maggie thought she had never been involved in a conversation with so many silences, except for the ones she had with her grandfather Mazza. Finally Bruce cleared his throat and said, “I remember when you came to my mother’s funeral. You had on a black dress with a red tie around the collar. You sent a Mass card. That was really nice.”
“The whole class sent flowers.”
“I know. That was nice, too. I just hated the way everybody looked at me when I went back to school. Like I was sick or something.”
They sat there for a long time, the small night noises clear in the darkness. Maggie suddenly sniffed the air.
“They’re smoking cigarettes,” Bruce said. “Richard stole a pack of his mother’s Salems.”
There was a funny clicking sound from inside the development house, and then a little scream. Maggie saw Debbie stick her head out the window. “Come here,” she hissed.
“Leave me alone,” Maggie said, and her voice sounded loud in the still air.
“It’s important,” Debbie said, and suddenly behind her there was a flash of orange, like the sun over the horizon of the beach first thing in the morning.
“Oh, hell,” Bruce said.
“What?”
Silently he took her hand and pulled her to her feet, and they began to run across the field, leaping over the bigger clods of earth. Maggie stumbled a little. She knew she should concentrate on where she was going, but all she could think of was his hand holding hers.
Inside the development house the smell of smoke was stronger, and a glow was coming from the open square at the top of the ladder. They scrambled up. In one corner a pile of cardboard boxes was burning brightly, the flames hugging a corner of the wall and blackening the two-by-fours of the ceiling. A stray breeze seemed to lift the center of the blaze and send it higher, and in the orange light Maggie could see that Debbie’s eyes were dazzled, and Richard was smiling faintly and running his long fingers through his hair.
“Jesus,” Bruce whispered.
“I’ll get some water,” Maggie said, but Richard reached for her arm and held her there, turned toward the fire.
“You’re crazy,” Richard said, mocking her in a high voice, twisting her arm a little.
“We’re going to burn the whole place down,” Debbie whispered, but even as she spoke the flames began to shrink, the boxes collapsing into a pile of rose-gray ash, the wood concave where the heat had eaten it away. The four of them stood and stared until finally there was only a great cloud of gray smoke.
“Damn,” Richard said. “The wood must be damp.”
“You did that on purpose?” Maggie said.
“Wasn’t it cool?” Debbie said. “You should have seen it at first. It just went woosh like a wave. It almost caught our hair.”
“Lighter fluid,” said Richard.
“You could have burned the whole house down,” Maggie said.
“Jesus,” said Richard, “are you always like this? It’s not a house. Nobody lives here. Nobody got hurt. Don’t you want something to do? Can’t