Bone Fire by Mark Spragg Read Free Book Online

Jean called.
    “Work,” he said.
    “I thought you were taking a long weekend.”
    “I am. Starla was just checking in.” His sunglasses were resting on the top of his head, and he pulled them off, cleaned the lenses with his handkerchief and put them on. The sky fell a deeper blue. “You want to go for a drive?”
    She stabbed her gardening trowel into a hump of dirt and stood. “I can’t. I need to study for my exam.” She placed her hands on her hips, pushing them around in a tight circle. She was wearing flowered gloves.
    “When’s that?”
    “Next week, but I’m behind.”
    She peeled the gloves off, tossing them beside the trowel, and pinched a joint out of her shirt pocket and lit it. She took a drag, holding the smoke in.
    “I thought you’d quit that.” He tried to spit but his mouth was too dry. He watched her exhale through her nose.
    “I did for a while. I decided I didn’t need to quit forever.”
    He turned toward the neighbors’ house to see if they were out in their yard, and when he looked back she was holding the jointup in front of her face, examining it like it was a bug she’d never seen before.
    “Don’t you just love the shit out of Rose?” she said.
    “Rose Bauman?”
    She nodded, clenching the joint between her teeth, squatting to get the weed box cradled up in her arms. “Her son sends it to her from San Diego.” Her head was tilted back to keep the smoke out of her eyes and she lurched forward, kicking out with her feet until she hit the wheelbarrow. She dropped the box in just as the bottom came apart.
    “I can’t hear you when you’ve got something in your mouth.”
    She cupped the joint in her left hand, bending the hand forward to rub at her eyes with the back of her wrist. When she was done she said, “It helps with Rose’s glaucoma.”
    A hummingbird hovered for an instant between them, its wings buzzing as it banked away, and the sudden lack of sound produced the effect of a greater silence. Then a dog barked, a car passed in the street, someone started a lawn mower down the block.
    They both stood watching the hummingbird arc back over the house, returning to a border of marigolds.
    She took another hit, holding the smoke in, pointing back at the wheelbarrow. “Could I get you to empty that for me?”
    “Sure.”
    He stepped past the tomato plants starting up lush and bushy in their wire cages, and carefully over the deep green peppers, lifting the handles and pushing the wheelbarrow through the soft dirt to the northwest corner of the garden, where he’d dug a compost pit in the spring. He turned it up, tilting it over onto the heap of decomposing weeds and kitchen waste. The wheel was caked with mud and spun slowly in the air, and the bottle flies rose from the soggy mulch in a high-pitched drone.
    “You hungry?” she called. She held the screen door open but hadn’t yet stepped up onto the porch.
    “I’m good for now,” he said. “But maybe after I take my drive.”

Six
    K ENNETH FINISHED clearing the table and when he had the oilcloth sponged clean he joined McEban at the sink. He shook a dishtowel out and dried the plates already washed and leaned up edgewise in the rack, and then they shelved them away in the cupboards and slotted the silverware back in the drawer. They left the pans to air-dry, tilted so they’d drain. It’s how they clean up every evening, and the boy will be eleven this winter and they never have treated each other like father and son, they’ve always managed better than that.
    He pushed their chairs in at the table, draping the towel over the backladder of a chair. The screen door to the mudroom stood open but the outside door was still closed against the day’s heat.
    “It’ll go quicker with both of us,” McEban said.
    The boy glanced down the hallway, where they could hear water running in the bathroom. “It’s your turn,” he said. “I got to go to town with her this morning.” He smiled. “Anyway, she’s