Madison House by Peter Donahue

Author:Peter Donahue
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hawthorne Books
Published: 2011-08-19T00:00:00+00:00

MADDIE STUDIED THE CHAIR IN HER KITCHEN A MOMENT longer, then opened the hatch on the stove again, dispensing with the use of oven mitts or dishrags (her fingers long ago callused from handling the hot iron), and reaching into the stove’s firebox with the scoop, stirred in the lumps of shiny black anthracite with their red-glowing cousins, which she’d tossed into the stove the previous night before retiring to bed. She pulled her arm out and reached for the bellows that hung from a nail above the stove and gave the bed of coals three long blasts. The coals flared and a wave of heat blew back into her face.

“I wonder,” she said aloud, backing away from the stove, thinking of Laurette. Fire genuinely frightened her – from the fire that killed Laurette in Dawson, to the Great Seattle Fire that people still remembered and spoke of, to the fire that destroyed most of San Francisco last year after the earthquake, to the fire just three weeks ago that brought down the remains of the Washington Hotel. Even her stove fires made her nervous, she realized, as she stared into the firebox transfixed by the bright red mound of coals burning like Nebuchadnezzar’s fiery furnace, and then hastily shut the hatch, closed the damper, and hung the bellows back on the wall.

She was reaching for the enameled teapot on the back of the stove when the straight-back chair skidded on the linoleum – abruptly and just once – almost as if she had bumped it herself, though she knew she hadn’t. She stared at the chair for a long moment, teapot in hand.

“Laurette,” she said. “Laurette, is that you?” One of the chair legs abutted the thick iron floor plate on which the stove rested – which was not right, not right at all, since she vigilantly kept the chair clear from direct contact with the floor plate and the hot stove for fear they might combust.

She set the teapot on the stove lid and making a wide circle in front of the chair – just in case – took hold of the chair from the side and slid it back away from the stove and the iron floor plate. “It’s the cold, I know,” she said, and wondered if the chair were not trying to join the fate of its companion pieces lost in the Dawson fire, or if perhaps Laurette herself wished the chair to burn so her own wandering soul could come to rest, the table and chair set restored to her complete in the great everlasting.

It was all too much for Maddie to ponder just now. Her morning blurriness, she knew, made her susceptible to such fanciful thinking, and indeed the whole business of the afterlife was really no business of hers. She had enough cares in this world – presented to her in the likes of Thomson and Calhoun and their cohorts in city hall trying to take from her all she’d worked so

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