Twenty Grand

Author:Rebecca Curtis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins

YEARS LATER I was awake late at night. I was doing nothing, alone, late at night, when I saw, beyond my window, down the block, a fire I can only describe as immense, an entire house aflame, and—this was before the sirens had been called and the red trucks filled the road—dozens of shapes, moving slowly back and forth below the houses next to mine, the people who had gone outside to see the fire, which for seconds shot up to the height of the telephone wires and then almost extinguished itself and then shot up again. The neighboring houses, only five feet away, were surely blackening, and all the people on the block, now, it seemed had been drawn outside to see, and I thought: How morbid, how petty, this unabashed fascination with someone else’s tragedy.

I sat in my small second-floor apartment and watched, by myself, from there. I thought of Jacob. The association—sentimental, clichéd, or simply unkind; but who can condone or forgive an association?—was involuntary. In the fall of that year I had heard from my sister, who was pregnant and had taken to mailing me, along with brief notes, small tins of dried fruits or decorated sachets of herbal tea, things that she thought I might like. I could barely read her letters, although they were typed. She was married and a lawyer and lived in an entire world of lawyers, who played softball together and together raised vast funds for notable charities and came together on weekends to teach their tiny and beautiful children to sing, and among all this detail she wrote well meant things like “It just takes time” and “I know one day soon you’ll find someone” that made me feel as if no one in the vastness of a million well-named villages would ever know anyone else. She added, by hand, at the bottom of one of these letters, that she’d seen Jacob at the law school, where she’d been invited to preside over the moot court—a semi-pathetic contraption like a debate team for people done with high school—and that he seemed well, was scheduled to graduate in spring in the bottom middle of his class, and had accepted a job in the Bay Area, where his parents had moved for their health. Had his skin always been so bad? she asked. She didn’t remember. She wouldn’t want me to think that she didn’t think well of me, or that she didn’t think I was beautiful. This was her longest ever P.S. I hadn’t heard from him, myself, after that night, although I had been nervous for a while, when the phone rang, until I realized it wasn’t ever going to be him. I’m sure, now, in retrospect, that the fire was set only for the utterly practical purpose of insurance; the house was old, in bad condition, and no one lived in it. But watching, then, I imagined another reason: no reason at all, or anger, or despair; and this

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