The Fires by Rene Steinke Read Free Book Online Page A

one day be taken back. The streets named after presidents and species of trees marched in a grid around the courthouse until they got as far as the surrounding cornfields, where they could safely forget themselves in dirt.
    When I dropped out of the local college, my mother was afraid I’d move away, but it was a difficult place to leave. I daydreamed about traveling, but plans to actually go anywhere always faded away like the streets once they reached the edge of town.
    The hotel was square, three floors of brick the color of yellowed paper, with four curtained windows on each floor facing Lincoln, the main street. A red-brick path led from the sidewalk to the front door, which was topped by a short, black awning that said LINDEN in sturdy block letters.
    Each night at the front desk I counted the change into a small green metal box and put the rest in a zippered bag for the bank.
    The bills were limp and soft as felt, the coins clammy, and when I finished, my hands felt the pleasant grime of travel and strangers’ fingers.
    37

    38 / RENÉ STEINKE
    I’d sit with a book, or sometimes just watch the heavy wooden door, anticipating the turn of the knob. Living in Porter had made me good at waiting. I waited for shoes to creak on the wooden floor, then pad onto the flat gold carpet. I waited for the harried voices of people who’d spent too long in a car or a bus, for the smell of cigarettes and soda, for flesh to be reflected in the cheap crystal of the miniature chandelier that had hung there in the lobby since the hotel had opened a hundred years before.
    My grandfather had been worried about the germs. “When someone sneezes or scratches or coughs—I don’t care who they are—” he said, “take two steps back and look away. No sense exposing yourself.” He and my grandmother had stayed at the Linden the night of their wedding. There would have been no cheap paintings or trophy cases in the lobby back then, just the clean white walls and the chandelier’s teardropped pieces of glass.
    It was Wednesday. The night before at the Paradise Lounge, I’d gotten so drunk with two seed salesmen that I ended up in the ladies’ room throwing up pink, sweet, whiskey-sour vomit, and that afternoon I had a bad headache.
    Jo came in and sat behind the desk beside me. She pulled out the writing board and said, “You look a little peaked,” in that half-British voice of hers that she’d gleaned from old movies.
    “I’m fine,” I said, putting away the change box in the drawer.
    “Sure?” She fixed her eyes on me. “I have some saltines and aspirin in my purse.” She took out the adding machine and quickly punched out a tape of the week’s profits, her gaze snapping between the ledger and her dancing fingers. Her feet were aligned on the floor, her back straight, her face serious. She took an exacting pleasure in tasks like this. It must have come from so many years playing the viola, practicing scales and counting to the metronome. She sometimes had to bail her drunk father out of jail, after his arrests for disorderly conduct, and when I pictured THE FIRES / 39
    her talking to the judge, it was this practical face I saw, as if she had to practice and count to make sure her eyes and mouth would work properly for her.
    She was unusually quiet today, and I wondered if she’d had a fight with her fiancé, David. I watched the tape snake out from the machine, her fingers tapping, and the mechanical swallow each time she hit the plus sign.
    I used to be practical, too. I’d wanted to be a teacher and had finished two semesters and begun the training before I knew I’d made a mistake. Mostly what I ended up teaching the children was how to wait. They were so well behaved. They looked up at me with wide, trusting eyes, crossed their legs and folded their hands prettily, listening for me to tell them what to do. I saw their lives stretched out in those moments of waiting—their little ears tingling, tipped forward—and