An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England_ A Novel - Brock Clarke [116]
"Thomas said he spent the night at our house," I said. "Is that true?"
"Yes," Anne Marie said. "He's spent more than one night."
"On the couch?" I asked.
Anne Marie didn't answer. She reached inside her vest, pulled out her pack of cigarettes, took a cigarette and a lighter out of her pack, and lit the cigarette, all without taking her gloves off. I realized right then that Anne Marie was a capable woman. I'd never thought of her that way before. There were so many other questions I wanted to ask her ― what had she and my mother talked about? for instance ― but I didn't, because I now knew she was a capable woman, and capable women don't answer questions from people who have no right to ask them. This will go in my arsonist's guide, too.
"Where did my mother go just now?" I finally asked, picking what I hoped was an innocuous question that Anne Marie would be willing to answer. She did.
"She went to work."
"Work?" I said. "Where's that?"
Here something odd happened: the smoke poured out of Anne Marie's mouth and she smiled at me, like a softhearted dragon. "You'll never guess where she works," Anne Marie said.
"I probably won't," I admitted.
"She works at the Student Prince," Anne Marie said. The Student Prince was the German restaurant in Springfield that Anne Marie and I had lived above when we were first married. I knew now why she was smiling at me: she was remembering that happy time, our first child, our first home, the early, best stages of our love. This is not to say that love endures, but that the memory of it does, even ― or especially ― if we don't want it to.
"What a coincidence," I said.
"It's not a coincidence," Anne Marie said, and then before I could ask her what she meant, she threw her spent cigarette in the snow and said, "You'll have to ask her yourself."
"OK."
"Your mother's a good woman, Sam," she told me. "She deserves better than your father."
"I know."
"She deserves better than you, too."
"I know that," I said. For the first time, I was thinking of what I'd done to my mother and not what I thought she'd done to me. She deserved a better son than me, a better person than me. This is another way you know you've become a grown-ass man, when you realize ― too late, too late ― that you're not worthy of the woman who made you one. Of the women who made you one.
"Your mother is afraid that you set fire to those writers' houses," Anne Marie said, and then she named them: the Bellamy and Twain houses. She didn't mention the Robert Frost Place. This probably meant my mother had stopped following me after she'd seen me kissing the woman in the bar, which was too bad: if she'd followed me to the Robert Frost Place, then she'd have known I didn't torch it, and she'd also have seen who did. "She's worried about you."
"I didn't set fire to any writer's house," I said.
"Except for the one," Anne Marie said.
"And that was an accident," I said.
"I don't want to hear it," she said.
"A woman set fire to the Bellamy and Twain houses," I went on.
"What woman?"
"I don't know yet," I said. "But I'm pretty sure Thomas has an idea."
"Sam ...... Anne Marie said. I could hear the exasperation in her voice, so beautiful and familiar, but sad, too, like hearing church bells right before your funeral. I should have stopped talking right then, but I didn't, and my words were like the snow, which kept falling and falling even though too much of it had fallen already.
"And then the bond analysts burned down the Robert Frost Place."
"The what? And who?" Anne Marie said, and then before I could answer, she said, "Forget it. I don't want to hear about any fucking bond analysts. I don't want to hear about anything anymore."
"But Anne Marie," I said, "it's true."
"Oh, Sam," Anne Marie said. "Why don't you take some responsibility for once?"
"For burning down those houses?"
"For everything," she said. Then she turned around and walked