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couple of minutes later, he said, “But they don’t want to make peace.
    They want to invade her like a country. If she’d stayed with them any longer, she’d be in the loony bin now. At least she’s not there.
    We can be grateful for that, can’t we?”

    THE FIRES / 29
    I looked at the white plastic radio the shape of a grapefruit perched on the bookshelf and wished I could turn it on to look for my new favorite song. I didn’t want him to know how little I knew. I was afraid he’d be less likely to trust me, or might even ask me to leave, and I began to think, superstitiously, that just talking about Hanna would help, that somehow she’d hear us.
    I asked him about his job at a printer’s, about his neighborhood, his family in New Jersey. Then, abruptly, he asked if I thought Hanna was happy. It was a question that made me think of stiff half-circle smiles and tight patent-leather shoes I once wore.
    “I read somewhere that the secret is to have good health and a short memory,” I said. “She seems to have both.”
    “You think so?” he said, wincing as if the vulnerability in his face were painful or had somehow clouded his vision. “Once I threw a party for her—her birthday—I went out and got her blue cheese, some nice bread, a case of wine, chocolate cake. I invited all these people, and they didn’t have to, but they brought gifts.
    People danced. I remember there were lily petals all over the floor, from people jostling against the flowers. She had on a pretty long dress, she was smiling and laughing, and everyone was having a good time when near the end, she sat down in a corner on the floor and burst into tears. Just sat there crying into her lap.
    I couldn’t get her to say what it was. No one could.”
    A flick of memory brushed past me, just a moth wing: tree bark and branches like a girl’s arms. “You think you know why now?”
    He nodded too certainly. “She was melancholy. Too much of a party knocked her off balance, scared her.” I remembered my father once said that she needed more than she could imagine anyone giving her.
    I told Cornell about the time we were eating dinner at my grandparents’ house when she suddenly appeared in the dim dining room, more like a wish than a person. As if she’d been ex-30 / RENÉ STEINKE
    pecting her but forgot, my grandmother Marietta set a place and filled a plate, my mother talked breezily about Hanna’s skirt, with its gold-coin buttons, and my father squinted at her and kept wiping his eyes. When I hugged her, she whispered, “Don’t believe what they say about me.” My grandfather looked down at his turkey and went on eating. She sat down and said, “I can’t stay long,” smoothing a napkin in her lap and glancing at him nervously.
    Before the pie was cut, she bent over to say to me, “He can’t keep this up forever, can he?” Her dark hair, its natural color, was braided tightly and twisted over her ears, and her nails were dirty with blue paint. She looked tired but smiled with her lips closed, so the dimples curled in her full cheeks, and she patted me on the knee under the table as if to signal she was okay. I was just a girl, but she always acted as if we’d taken a long car trip together and shared a hundred meals, as if we’d seen things others would be envious of and so we had to keep them secret.
    As much as I liked this, I always knew she could just as easily invent another thing that would please her even more.
    Hanna kept trying to catch my grandfather’s eye, but he went on ignoring her. Whenever she spoke, he turned his head slightly to the wall. While my mother and I collected the dirty plates, he said, “We don’t have meals like this often enough,” and I wished he’d meant it. While my parents asked Hanna about her life in Chicago, he played with crumbs of piecrust. I was furious. Ask her anything, I thought. At least look at her face. I couldn’t think of what on earth she could have done to him to make