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shoulder. She hit him with the dryer, hard enough to hurt. He thumped downstairs as quickly as he could, trying to catch the dryer with his free hand and getting rapped on the knuckles and the wrist.
    At the bottom of the stairs, she quit attacking him and sagged. He took her out back, where the smoke had risen high enough to shadow out the sun. Joan, waiting helpless in the corner of the yard, thought her sister had collapsed and started sobbing.
    “She’s okay,” Henry said, standing them together.
    Nan turned and saw the Bailey house, heavily aflame. She hugged the dryer to her breast and wobbled on her heels.
    “Don’t move,” Henry said.
    He ran around the house toward the sirens out front. A crosswind of fire hit him at the porch. He wasn’t seriously burned, only flashed on the cheek, but he staggered with his hand clapped to his face.
    Fire in and out the windows, flaring up the eaves, roaring with a sound like wind through a tunnel. The flames had jumped a hedge to number ten—Billy Kane—where he noticed that the flag had withered on the pole.
    Trucks jammed around the road but no one seemed to rush. Firefighters walked instead of ran, their lack of energy surreal but almost comforting to see. Henry found his mailbag lying on the ground. He grabbed it out of instinct and ran toward the Baileys’ house, stepping on a fire hose and awed by the colors.
    Number four had started burning: the Carmichael family—Peg and Bob, two young boys. Someone yanked him by the arm until he stood across the street, where his bowels turned feeble at the full panorama. Henry clenched tight, scared he’d have an accident, jellied in the legs and fighting for a breath. He didn’t recognize the neighborhood. Red and white lights, fire in the windows, diesel fuel blowing off the engines of the trucks. Smoke towered up and carried for a mile, tall enough for anyone in town to see it rise.
    An ambulance arrived, police and paramedics. Henry took a firefighter roughly by the arm. He was young, just a rookie with a red goatee.
    “There’s two ladies in the yard at number eight,” Henry yelled.
    “Where’s eight?”
    Something terrible collapsed, an entire piece of roof, sending sparks sky-high from the Baileys’ second floor. Out the corner of his eye he saw the window of the dormer, and a person at the glass, barely real, like a mannequin.
    “There!” he yelled. “Upstairs, number six!”
    “What…”
    “Someone in the dormer!”
    The rookie hesitated, frazzled by the extra information. He sent a firefighter after the Finns and ran to the Baileys’ with another pair of men. Henry followed them, adrenalized and charging at the flames. He stumbled on a hose and landed on his palms, mailbag spilling out before him in the road. A gust of wind picked a letter up and took it to the flames. Henry gathered up the rest and crammed it into his bag. A policewoman pulled him off the ground with a jerk, swearing in his ear and telling him to go .
    Henry checked the dormer but the figure wasn’t there. He moved away, searching every window of the house. The fire shifted and he saw her—there, downstairs. A woman, like a sculpture, burning in the living room, standing with her arm raised gracefully above her. She was beautiful aflame and Henry almost swooned.
    Then he took another look—it really was a sculpture, and it must have been a statue he had spotted upstairs. Everyone was out. Everyone was safe. But he staggered once more just looking at the damage, sitting on the ground and seeing what he’d done. The water barely helped. They’d be fighting it for hours. He tottered back and forth, clutching at his hair, staring at the flames until his eyes went dry.
    Nan and Joan Finn joined him at the curb. They were small and holding hands, kid sisters in a storm, oblivious and trusting him, believing he had saved them. Joan was right beside him, wearing slippers in the grass. The hem of Nan’s bathrobe swayed near his leg. Pain