Those Who Favor Fire by Lauren Wolk (easy readers .TXT) 📕

she preferred to dwell on the here and now. So they talked about the fire, about the Schooner and the bridge, about Angela and Earl, about Ian Spalding and the demise of his campground.

“How does he make a living now?” Joe asked.

“He’s a part-time schoolteacher, nearly ready to retire in any event.” Which Joe could easily believe, for Ian had a teacher’s way about him: he explained things well, seemed happy to share what he knew, had a voice made for the ear and an easy way about him. Joe thought he would be hard to ruffle. But he was also aware that he cared what Ian thought about him, which was unusual for Joe. Perhaps this was because Ian was so much older, so respectable-looking: his cuffs buttoned, sparse hair nicely cut, matching crow’s feet around his kind eyes. Or perhaps because he had taught school for so long that he had learned the trick of treating others as he himself wanted to be treated: with patience and respect.

“The campground wasn’t anything more than a way for Ian to keep busy during the summers and make a bit of extra money,” Rachel said. “It was never very popular anyway. Just people passing through on their way somewhere else. But nobody passes through here on purpose anymore.” She wondered if Joe was an exception, and if so, why. But she figured he’d tell her if he wanted to.

After their coffee was gone, they grew awkward with each other and Joe realized it was time to leave. “I guess I’d better go fetch my Schooner,” he said. “I left it over at the A&P. Too bad Ian lives so far out. I’d rather not drive the Schooner into town again if I can help it, but I can’t see walking all that way.”

Rachel thought about that for a moment and then reluctantly said, “I guess you could borrow my father’s bike. If you promise to take good care of it.” She had mixed feelings about this man. One minute he was saying something to offend her, the next smiling his winsome smile, looking at her with those remarkably blue eyes, daring her to think ill of him.

He made her wary, suspicious, but she was tempted to trust him with small things. As if he were an ex-con or a friend known to lie. She had allowed him into her home. She would lend him her father’s old bike.

“You’ll need to walk it down to Frank’s,” she warned as they hauled the bike out of the cellar. “The tires need air, and I’ll bet the chain wants a bit of oil.”

“This is wonderful,” he said, meaning it. “I’ll take great care of it. Thanks.”

Before he went away, she gave him her phone number (she’d thought about the wisdom of that while bringing out the bike and decided it could do no harm). “It’s such a small town you shouldn’t have trouble finding anything you need, but call me if you do.”

“Thanks, Rachel. Ian’s right there, but thanks. Maybe I’ll see you at Angela’s again.”

She watched him walk off down the hill, wheeling the old bike that had been her father’s for so many years. She liked Joe despite herself. “I’ll have to watch that,” she thought. The day stretched ahead of her with no reason to hurry, no plans or commitments. She sighed and turned back toward the porch.

“That damned step,” she muttered when it sagged under her weight. “Today’s the day I fix that damned step.” Ed would be disappointed, she knew. It gave him something to complain about when he brought her mail. “One of these days it’s gonna go,” he often warned her. “Someone’s gonna get hurt.” And he was right, of course. The step was rotten with worms and wet. So she gathered up her tools and set to work.

With a crowbar, she pried and tugged and cursed until the top plank of the step gave way, splintering and shrieking, flakes of old paint flying. As she worked, she began to remember herself as a small girl. Struggling with her father’s hammer. Handing him nails and clapping her hands over her ears as he pounded them in. Trailing her small paintbrush along the wood, leaving grasslike streaks that skipped against the grain. Strangling with pride when he admired her work. These had been their steps, the ones they had built together. This rotten plank had been measured by his hands, fashioned with his saw, borne his weight, her mother’s, hers. This rotten plank. She set it to one side and looked straight into the sun. It was nothing to the brightness of her memory.

And suddenly it seemed to Rachel that she simply could not leave this place. The thought of going back to school again while this house stood here, locked up, mute with dust, made her sob aloud. She would stay, she decided. She would stay right here where she belonged.

As if afraid that her resolve might waver, she sprinted inside the house, up the stairs, and into the small study that overlooked the woods behind the house. Two blue jays were wrestling in the branches of a big maple. Rachel kept an eye on them as she rolled clean paper into her mother’s old typewriter and began to compose her letter to Dean Franklin. It thanked him for three good years, informed him that she had decided to postpone the fourth. She wouldn’t be wandering through Europe or getting the jump on her career, she wrote. She’d be catching her breath. Getting her bearings. She would be back, she assured him, when the time was right. If they would still have her.

She signed the letter, sealed it up in an envelope, stamped it, put it out on the porch for Ed. She felt better than she had since arriving back in Belle Haven, as deliciously guilty as a child who is kept home from school for a fever but does not yet feel any pain.

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