I looked at Kathleen. She nodded.
“I’d like that,” I said.
Before showing it to me, Addie wanted to say something. “All the camera pictures of me and Maddie got rooned in the fire, so I drawed a picture of Maddie so all my new friends could see what we looked like before we got burned up.”
She handed me a crayon drawing of a girl’s face.
“That’s Maddie,” she said. “Wasn’t she beautiful?”
I couldn’t trust myself to speak so I just nodded.
When we left the burn unit, Kathleen said, “I love them all, but Addie’s the one who got me praying.”
“What happened to her?” I asked.
Kathleen took a deep breath before speaking. “About two weeks ago, Addie’s house caught on fire. Her parents, Greg and Melanie, died in the fire while trying to save the girls’ lives.”
“Addie was able to talk about it?”
Kathleen nodded. “There was also the 911 call Melanie made.
Apparently she got trapped downstairs. Greg made it to the girls’ room and put wet towels over their faces to keep them alive until the firefighters arrived.”
“Smart guy to think about the towels,” I said.
“Addie originally thought the wet towels flew into the room by themselves. When they explained her mom threw them, her face lit up. Until that moment, she thought her mom had run away.”
We were both silent awhile.
“There was a lot of love in that marriage,” I said.
Kathleen said, “I haven’t experienced it personally, but I’ve always believed that during the course of a good marriage, especially when children are involved, husbands and wives often perform random acts of heroism that go largely unnoticed by the general public.”
“And in a great marriage,” I said, “when one spouse goes down, the other takes up the slack.”
Kathleen gave me a look that might have been curiosity, might have been affection.
“You surprise me, Creed.”
CHAPTER 5
“These little bombs weigh in at 490 calories,” Kathleen Gray said.
I glanced at the paltry square.
“That number seems high,” I said.
“Trust me,” she said. “I used to work at the one in Charleston.”
It was 7:45 pm and we were in Starbucks on Third and East Sixty-Sixth. Neither of us had much of an appetite, but Kathleen said she always treated herself to a raspberry scone after spending time at the burn center. She took a bite.
“Yum,” she said. “Technically, it’s a raspberry apricot thumbprint scone.” She cocked her head and appraised me.
“You sure you don’t want to try one?”
I didn’t and told her so. “Plus there’s the other thing,” I said.
“What other thing?”
“The acronym for it is RATS,” I said.
She studied me a moment, a faint smile playing about her lips. I saw them move ever-so-slightly as she performed the mental calculation.
“You’re an odd duck,” she said. “You know that, right?”
I sipped my coffee and made a note of the fact that I had now met three of Ken Chapman’s women, and two of them had commented on my strangeness on successive days. The third of Chapman’s women was my ex-wife, Janet, and her opinion of me was beyond repair.
Someone pushed open the front door, and a rush of wind blew some rain in, lowering the temperature by ten degrees. Or so it seemed. Something behind us caught Kathleen’s eye and she giggled.
“The barista was talking to someone and pointing at you,” she said. “I think it has something to do with the venti.”
I frowned and shook my head in disgust. “Barista,” I said.
Kathleen giggled harder. She scrunched her face into a pout.
“You’re such a grump!” she said.
“Well, it’s ridiculous,” I said.
She broke into a bubbly laugh. I continued my rant.
“These trendy restaurants, they’re all so pretentious! Just yesterday I saw a guy nearly die from eating some kind of exotic Japanese dish. And here,” I gestured toward the coffee-making apparatus, “you have to learn a whole new friggin’ language in order to justify spending four bucks for a cup of Joe.”
