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"I did?" she said, opening her eyes for the first time since beginning the story.

"After you'd burned my sandwich."

"That's funny," she said. "I don't remember that. I remember so many things, but not that."

"What did Dad say?"

"He said that he was drunk and that it didn't mean anything and that he loved me and that this was the first time it had happened and that it would never happen again."

"He did," I said, recognizing most of his words as mine and feeling so ashamed ― for the bad things I'd done and the borrowed words I'd used to excuse them. Why is it we can't find our own words for the bad things we do? Is that part of what makes them so bad? "What did you do next?"

"I kicked him out."

"I thought you kicked him out because he couldn't decide what he wanted to do for a living and he was pathetic and driving you nuts."

"That's just what I wanted you to think. I really kicked him out because he was cheating on me."

"Did you love him?"

"Yes," she said immediately, just as my father had when I asked him if he loved my mother. My parents were certain they loved each other, and yet look at how they'd turned out. Maybe it would be better not to be so certain. Maybe love, and marriage, and life, and maybe anything that matters, would work out better if we weren't so certain about them.

"Mom," I said, "why did Dad come back?"

"Because I let him," my mother said. "Because he said he'd made a terrible mistake. Because he missed us. Because he said he loved me and not that woman on the stove. Because he said he would never, ever see her again."

"And you believed him," I said.

"I did," she said, and I could hear the voice the bartender no doubt heard when my mother talked about my father, the voice that wanted the story she told about her husband to be the truth, and the truth to be just a story. "I still do."

"Mom," I said, as gently as I could, "you live in another apartment in another town. You come back to the house to drink, but then when it's time to go to bed, you drive to your apartment. On Tuesday nights you don't come home at all. There must be a good reason."

"There must be," she said, nodding.

"What is it?"

She closed her eyes again, as though trying to remember the lies she'd told herself for so many years and now wanted to tell me. She kept her eyes closed for so long this time that I thought she'd fallen asleep. Then suddenly she opened them and said, "The apartment is a place for me to get away, that's all."

"Get away from what?" I asked, because I wasn't going to let it go. Because like Socrates and his method, I wasn't going to let my mother get out of this conversation without her giving me the answer I wanted.

"From life," she said.

"So what was our house for?"

"A place to come back to," she said. "For you, too." She got up, tucked her tray under her arm, and said, "Time to get back to work."

"I know about Deirdre," I told her, because I wanted everything out in the open, where we could see it, where we couldn't ignore it anymore, and as I'll say in my arsonist's guide, once you get everything out in the open, you wonder why, oh, why would you ever want that.

"How do you know about her?" My mother was trying to remain calm, but it was a losing battle. She went fierce and far away in the eyes, as though she'd just spotted her enemy from a great distance. She raised her tray and held it in front of her chest like a shield. "How do you even know her name?"

"I met her at our house," I said.

"Our house," she repeated, trancelike. "When?"

"This morning," I said. "I know you think it was me who burned down those houses. But it wasn't. I think it was Deirdre." I'm not sure my mother even heard this last part, though, because this is the way the human mind works, or doesn't: when it understands that the worst thing has happened, it can't think about the second- or third- or fourth-worst thing until it takes care of the first-worst thing, either by making it better or by making it even worse.

"You weren't ever supposed to know about her," my mother said. "He promised."