Pie squinted, taking that in. “You can’t be up there, V. Rose would want you down.”
“I don’t think she wants me at all,” I grumbled. “When she comes back, she’ll probably give us the boot. Of course, she might be dead.”
Pie grabbed my shoulders and shook me. “Stop that. You don’t think she’s dead, any more than I do.”
I bowed my head and tried to hear what the bones of the house were telling me.
“V? Answer me.”
“No,” I said. “She’s not dead.”
That first day, Tan kept busy. He coaxed several servants from the neighboring houses to help him carry Rose’s old cast-iron stove, the one stored on the back porch, to the curb. He intended to set up an outdoor kitchen since it wasn’t safe to use the gas inside. He did so on no one’s authority but his own. I suppose, like me, he was trying to prove himself worthy.
Once he had the stove in place, he used the boards from the witch’s cap and fashioned a shack with a roof and walls open to the house and to the street.
As Tan worked outside, I worked within. Having decided that the house was our safest bet—on no proof other than it had survived so far intact—I decided we’d stay, at least for a few nights. I cleared the kitchen of broken glass and crockery, and started on the mess in the parlor.
And all the while the smoke from the fires grew thicker, alongside the steady thunk, thunk of Tan’s father’s ax at work in the alley.
At some point in the afternoon, Pie brought me a cup of milk and some cheese and crackers. “Don’t be mad,” she said. “I gave them a plate too. It seemed only right.”
“What’s stopping him from coming inside and getting it himself?” I asked. “It’s his kitchen.”
“Maybe he’s scared of you.”
“Ha! Hardly.”
“Tan’s father,” Pie said, changing the subject. “His name is LowNaa. It means old tooth.”
“Why do they call him that?”
“Here,” she said, tapping her incisor. “When he smiles, his teeth sort of stick out, like a vampire.”
“Oh.”
“He’s actually quite sweet.” Pie had another coughing spell; I waited till it passed.
“Did you tell Tan about Morie?”
“Yah, I told him.”
“And what else, Pie? I suppose you and Tan had a nice ol’ chat?”
“He wasn’t exactly warm, but he nodded, in his way. I suppose he didn’t mind me serving him. I think it was all right.” Pie held her hand on her chest, trying not to cough again. “He asked after you. Well, he asked where you were. I said you were upstairs, trying to fix everything all at once.”
“What did he say to that?”
Pie picked her words carefully, as if she were afraid I’d blow. “V, Tan doesn’t have any more wisdom than we do. But he’s trying to be of use.”
“I know what he said. He said I was an idiot. He said General’s dead thanks to me. Well, he’s right. I’m sure in some awful way he’s pleased.”
Pie started coughing again. “The fire,” she gasped, “I can’t—catch my breath.”
“You should lie down. Rest.”
But the fall of the ax below pulled her back to the window. “Oh, crikey.”
“What now?”
“It’s General. He’s too big to lift so they’re… they’re taking him piecemeal.”
I shut my eyes. “Please, could you please stop?”
The Fire
I am as old as the pharaohs now. If you ask me what I had for breakfast, there’s a blank page. Food is nothing to me. Nor this day: I’ll see it come, I’ll see it go. I am and I am not. But if you ask about those days, those days that broke and made me, I can say with certainty that on Wednesday, April 18, 1906, we ate roast beef and apricot jam. Pie found the jar in Rose’s larder. I broke the wax with my thumb and we scooped the jam into our mouths with our quake-filthed fingers.
That first evening, folks up and down the block followed Tan’s example and dragged chairs and tables from their houses, and we feasted in the street. LowNaa cooked the extra roasts from Rose’s icebox in the firepit in the garden, and Tan carved the meat in thin slices and served it with bread and butter. He must have made a hundred sandwiches that first night. Folks in the park came down and offered what they had, apples and boiled eggs and the heels of hams, and cakes and beans. Women and children, Dutch and Irish, Jews and Chinese, working folks and Pacific Heights swells ate together in the road.
Strangers asked Tan if he would fry their meat. He cooked with the precision of a master chef. And Lifang, she had this little knife she kept hidden under her tunic—who knows, she may have had a collection of knives under there. She snipped the ends on a bushel of green beans, cutting them at an angle, the way the Chinese liked to do.
LowNaa was the greeter. Since he had no English, he bowed and smiled. He was somehow pure, with freckled high cheeks, and when he smiled at you, you felt blessed. How such a father could produce Tan, so dour and scheming, I couldn’t make out. LowNaa seemed content to serve his son, and if they ever exchanged a laugh or a joke, I never saw it. He greeted everyone with the same joy, nodding and grinning exuberantly with his tea-stained teeth.
Mrs. Sugarman and the neighborhood women donned aprons and passed cider for the kids. Whatever goblet or chipped glass or china or tin cup was presented to him, Dr. Sugarman filled with wine.
We ate and drank. That’s the thing of it. We had survived the day.
“What a shame we never gathered like this before,” Pearl Sugarman said, being the jolly sort.
“We’re here to tell the tale now, eh?” her husband replied.
A young
