"What did you make."
"Rice and ground beef. Rice and chicken. Rice and a can of tomatoes. Rice and an egg if it was Wednesday."
"Wednesday."
"Wednesdays we ran low. Eggs were what we had on Wednesdays."
"All right."
"I lifted weights at the high school gym from when I was thirteen. I was not interested in being a girl. I was interested in being able to carry things. I joined the volunteer fire department in Reno when I was sixteen. I lied about my age. I told them I was eighteen. They knew I was sixteen and they let me on because the chief had been a friend of my mother. I rode an engine for the first time in February of my sixteenth year and I knew before we got to the call what I was going to do with my life."
"Sixteen."
"Sixteen."
"And the academy."
"At nineteen. I came up here to Redwater for the academy because the program was cheap and because I wanted to be away from Reno."
"And Val."
"Val pulled me out of a class of thirty in the third week. I had broken my nose against a brick on a forced-entry drill and I would not cry. She saidHale.I saidyes ma'am.She saidcome with me.I came with her. She was the lieutenant who ran the academy that year. She was thirty-three. It was a different time. She had a wife back then. It didn’t last. Lena came in 2017."
"Lena."
"Yes. Lena is her wife now. She is a firefighter too.”
"You like Lena?”
"Yes. I was skeptical at first. I thought Val would lose focus. But Lena has been good for Val. She has found her softness. She has given her strength.”
She drinks the coffee. She sets the cup on the dresser. She looks at me.
"What about you?”
"When I was a child?”
"Yes."
I take a minute.
I sit with it because I have not told anybody about my childhood since I was twenty-four and I told a woman at a poetry reading in Manhattan, and the woman at the poetry reading repeated a story I had told her at a party two months later, and I stopped telling people about my childhood after that. I have not told Daniel about my childhood. I told Daniel pieces of my childhood. I have not told a person the shape of the whole thing in eleven years.
I tell her.
I tell her about Sag Harbor and the house with the white columns and the long lawn that ran down to the water. I tell her about my mother's roses. I tell her about the boat. I tell her about my grandmother who lived in the carriage house and who taught me to bake bread before I was eight. I tell her about my father, who was a man who built a financial firm out of his father's small one and who made a great deal of money and who loved me in the way that men of his generation loved daughters, which was a way I am only now beginning to forgive him for. I tell her about my mother dying when I was twelve, of an aneurysm, on a Tuesday afternoon in the kitchen, in front of me. I tell her about boarding school. I tell her about the year at Brown. I tell her about quitting Brown to marry Daniel because I was twenty-five and I was lonely and Daniel was thirty-eight and Daniel knew the words to say to a twenty-five-year-old woman who had been lonely since she was twelve.
I tell her about my marriage.
I tell her about the rooms. I tell her about the dinners. I tell her about the men in dark suits who came on Thursdays and whose names I was not allowed to ask twice. I tell her about the year I asked. I tell her about the way Daniel responded to the asking, which was not a way I had any words for at the time and which I have words for now. I tell her about the soft room. I tellher about the eleven years of small careful no's I told myself were a kind of dignity. I tell her about the morning I stopped telling myself the no's were dignity.
She listens.
She listens the way she has listened to me since Tuesday, which is the way of a woman who is letting the words stand without putting her own words on them. She does not interrupt. She does not put her hand on me. She lets the telling be the telling.
When I am done she puts her hand on my knee.
"Evangeline."
