Fire Solves All Problems Perfectly pt 45

You are swallowed by air conditioning and bad lighting as you enter the mall concourse lined on both sides by glass storefronts and columns of volcanic rock; you walk on tan squares of painted concrete, lingering at Home Run Sporting Goods to inspect footballs, accepting ice cream samples from the Keepin’ Cool! kiosk, wandering through the Big Indian Arcade and wishing you brought money, pausing under the new ceiling above Quartermane’s Department Store: you tell Jason how the roof failed at Christmas two years ago under the record snow and your father happened to be there and had already dug out many trapped people by the time the firemen arrived; you don’t tell him that for days your father drug you all over town so that people could say good job and let me get that for you; when school resumed you brought his father’s pictures taken on the scene and was asked again and again by the fire kids to tell the story until the details you added matched none of what had actually happened. You think Jason’s going to make a joke but instead he whistles. That’s buster, he says, and that makes you feel good because very few things are buster, you only use that word for the very best stuff. And when Jason punches you in the arm for telling such a good story, you get that he thinks you’re like Tim, that all you have to do is say a couple of nice things and you’ll follow him around. Let him, you think; like your father says, people give you stuff to use against them all the time.

The mall is filled mostly with mothers and daughters, and watching them is like seeing the genealogy of the entire town: that woman, once a Dawson, is now a Milliron; her over there used to be a Thompson but then became a Whitehouse; the girl behind the register inside Sparrow’s department store is still a Shaw but will soon be married to a Hurless. You kind of feel sorry for them and the names that they only can take pride in by proxy unless they are like your grandma with three last names from three different husbands or a feminist like Bob Krim’s wife who kept her maiden name. What’s the point of getting married if your wife’s going to do that? your father has said. Why even bother?