At twelve-forty, lying in bed upstairs, she heard them. Far off at first, and then closer, coming down Center Street from the east. Not sirens. Just the low diesel growl of the trucks returning, no lights, no hurry, rolling slow through the sleeping town toward Mill Street.
She lay in the dark and listened until the sound stopped. Then, for the first time in sixteen years, she slept without dreaming.
*
She woke Friday morning to the sound of an engine she knew — a small, rattling, sewing-machine engine, the engine of a car that had been dead in a supermarket parking lot for a day and a half. She went to the window in her robe.
Her green Volkswagen was parked at the curb in front of the house, its little round headlights looking up at her like an apologetic dog. And climbing out of it, folding his long legs out of the absurdly small door, was Cal Dombrowski in his suede jacket.
She was downstairs and had the front door open before she had decided to do it.
He stopped at the bottom of the porch steps. He looked tired. There was a red mark across his forehead where the band of a helmet had pressed for hours, and his eyes were bloodshot from smoke, and even from the doorway she could smell it on him, that deep stubborn smell of burned wood and wet ash. He had shaved, though. She noticed that. He had gone home after a fire that lasted half the night and shaved before he came.