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

took things lightly. She knew, because she had spent years doing so, that it was better to face difficulties than to look away. After what he had been through, he was giving himself a chance to heal before going forward. Time to sort himself out. And again, she was right.

Three weeks after he’d arrived on her doorstep, he startled Holly by singing “Moon River” in his morning shower, by shaving carefully, by sitting the wrong way in a kitchen chair, so that his chin rested on its back, and declaring that he was famished. Over a feast of eggs and pumpkin bread, he told her that he wanted to go home.

“What are you talking about?” she cried, angry and alarmed. “You promised me you wouldn’t go anywhere near him again.”

“Oh, no,” he said, reaching one arm over the back of the chair. “No. Not there,” he said. “I want to go back to Belle Haven, Holly. As soon as I can.”

She sat down, shook her head. “Sorry,” she said. “I wasn’t thinking.” She looked straight at him and frowned. “Don’t you want to hang around a bit longer?”

“I’m okay now,” he said to the uncertainty in her eyes. “Honest, Holly. Even better than okay.” He smiled at her in a way she’d never seen before. He looked happy. “And besides,” he said, “I have something important to do.”

It took Joe two weeks to reach Belle Haven, for he stopped along the way to spend a great deal of his inheritance. It made him feel good to shed his wealth, for it was not really his. He had not earned it. Or if he had, it was by doing things he wished he could undo, following his father without question. Like the Jaguar he’d traded away, the money was tainted by its source, but he hoped that what he had bought with it would lead him entirely beyond the borders of his father’s shadow.

It was only when he saw through Rachel’s eyes what he’d done that he wondered whether he’d someday rue its price.

Joe arrived back in Belle Haven at the end of August. He had been gone for more than a month and was thinner than when he’d left. Paler. He moved a bit more slowly, as if his thoughts were sucking the blood up from his legs.

As the Greyhound bus pulled away from Frank’s Gas ’n’ Go, loud and stinking, Joe waited impatiently for the air to clear and the sounds of the night to return.

It was only about ten o’clock, but there was no one around. He had decided, on the bus, to walk up to Rachel’s house and surprise her, collect Pal, maybe stop and say hello to Angela and Dolly and Rusty on the way, see who might be sitting out on their porches, enjoying the cool night air and the white of the stars. But as he picked up his bag and turned to go, he saw, leaning up against the back of the busstop bench, the bicycle that Rachel had lent him so long ago. He had left it at the Schooner.

He looked at the bike, looked down Maple Street toward the creek and Rachel’s hill beyond it. He did not want to ride all the way to his hot Schooner, his bag making the trip a chore. Out there, so close to Ian’s empty house, he knew he would not be able to sleep. But something told him to go anyway. Something told him the bike had been left here so that he would.

He met no one on his way out. No cars. No hand-in-hand strollers. No dogs after mice in the grass. There was no moon. Only the lingering warmth muffled the brilliance of the stars. There was no wind, no sound loud enough to challenge the rattle of the old bike on the road. Even when he stopped to switch his bag to his other hand, Joe heard nothing. Saw nothing but an orange sheen in the air, reminding him that there was fire out here. He felt as if he were the last person alive on earth.

When he reached Ian’s lane and turned in, Joe was surprised to see light shining through the front windows of Ian’s house and the shape of a car parked by the door. As far as he knew, Ian had died with neither heirs nor will. He and Rachel had taken on the dreadful task of going through Ian’s house after his death, emptying his fridge, looking through his papers, watering his plants. Perhaps, Joe thought, some distant relatives had been found.

He turned down the bumpy lane that led through the woods to the Schooner, struggling to steer with one hand. Then up ahead there was the Schooner, waiting for him, and he was glad to be home.

There was a note wedged into the crack around his door. He carried it inside, put down his suitcase, switched on a light, and sat down to read it.

The Land you’re parked on has been sold,

Joe. If you need more than twenty-four hours

to leave, we can talk about it. Come see

me when you get back. I’m living in the

Spalding house.

—Mendelson

P.S. I’ll let you know what’s owing on the electric.

Joe threw the note away and opened his windows wide. Someone—Rachel, he presumed—had come around to close them to an inch or so and had also taken from his cupboards things that might have rotted, emptied out his small fridge, opened its door, unplugged it. He undressed and lay down on his stale bed. Through the nearest window he could see a piece of blackened sky.

For some reason he was afraid. Having to move the Schooner upset him, for he liked this spot by the stream and the way the fields looked in a storm. Pal, too, would miss it, her only home. But it was time to move, and move he would.

Something else was wrong. Something that awakened the remnants of his ancestors within him: those newly down