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me my mo manna… Anna. (“Chuck,”
Jesse would yell out. “Do Chuck!”)
    “Hey.” Kate points to Anna's neck. “Your locket's
missing.”
    It's the one I gave her, years ago. Anna's hand comes up to her collarbone.
“Did you lose it?” I ask.
    She shrugs. “Maybe I'm just not in the mood to wear it.”
    She's never taken it off, far as I know. Sara pulls the roast out of the
oven and sets it on the table. As she picks up the knife to carve, she looks
over at Kate. “Speaking of things we're not in the mood to wear,” she
says, “go put on another shirt.”
    “Why?”
    “Because I said so.”
    'That's not a reason."
    Sara spears the roast with the knife. “Because I find it offensive at
the dinner table.”
    “It's not any more offensive than Jesse's metalhead shirts. What's the
one you had on yesterday? Alabama Thunder Pussy?”
    Jesse rolls his eyes toward her. It's an expression I've seen before: the
horse in a spaghetti Western, gone lame, the moment before it's shot for mercy.
    Sara saws through the meat. Pink before, now it is an overcooked log.
“Now look,” she says. “It's ruined.”
    “It's fine.” I take the one piece she has managed to dissect from
the rest and cut a smaller bite. I might as well be chewing leather.
“Delicious. I'm just gonna run down to the station and get a blowtorch so
that we can serve everyone else.”
    Sara blinks, and then a laugh bubbles out of her. Kate giggles. Even Jesse
cracks a smile.
    This is when I realize that Anna has already left the table, and more
importantly, that nobody noticed.
    Back at the station, the four of us sit upstairs in the kitchen. Red's got
some kind of sauce going on the stove; Paulie reads the ProJo, and
Caesar's writing a letter to this week's object of lust. Watching him, Red
shakes his head. “You ought to just keep that filed on disk and print
multiple copies at a time.”
    Caesar's just a nickname. Paulie coined it years ago, because he's always
roamin'. “Well, this one's different,” Caesar says.
    “Yeah. She's lasted two whole days.” Red pours the pasta
into the colander in the sink, steam rising up around his face. “Fitz,
give the boy some pointers, will you?”
    “Why me?”
    Paulie glances up over the rim of the paper. “Default,” he says,
and it's true. Paulie's wife left him two years ago for a cellist who'd swung
through Providence on a symphony tour; Red's such a confirmed bachelor he
wouldn't know what a lady was if she came up and bit him. On the other hand,
Sara and I have been married twenty years.
    Red sets a plate down in front of me as I start to talk. “A
woman,” I say, “isn't all that different from a bonfire.”
    Paulie tosses down the paper and hoots. “Here we go: the Tao of Captain
Fitzgerald.”
    I ignore him. “A fire's a beautiful thing, right? Something you can't
take your eyes off, when it's burning. If you can keep it contained, it'll
throw light and heat for you. Its only when it gets out of control that you
have to go on the offensive.”
    “What Cap is trying to tell you,” Paulie says, “is that you
need to keep your date away from crosswinds. Hey, Red, you got any
Parmesan?”
    We sit down to my second dinner, which usually means that the bells will
ring within minutes. Firefighting is a world of Murphy's Law; it is when you
can least afford a crisis that one crops up.
    “Hey, Fitz, do you remember the last dead guy who got stuck?”
Paulie asks. “Back when we were vollies?”
    God, yes. A fellow who weighed five hundred pounds if he weighed an ounce,
who'd died of heart failure in his bed. The fire department had been called in
on that one by the funeral home, which couldn't get the body downstairs.
“Ropes and pulleys,” I recall out loud.
    “And he was supposed to be cremated, but he was too big…” Paulie
grins. “Swear to God, as my mother's up in Heaven, they had to take him to
a vet instead.”
    Caesar blinks up at him. “What for?”
    “How do you think they