She burned down the house. Or she tried to. It's been gutted. That's what my mom said over the phone. It's been gutted. Gutted. No insides anymore. It was the house I grew up in. The house my brother grew up in. The house my sister was born in.

I told my mother I would help her clean it out.

********

In my memory, we came directly from Pennsylvania to that house, though, I know, there must have been months spent in other temporary housing. My mother, my father, my brother, and I drove across the country in an old pickup with a camper shell. We moved to California for my mother. So she could be near her parents. We nearly died twice in that pickup.

Sometime just after my father pointed out the Mississippi, my mother, after driving too long, fell asleep and drifted off the freeway onto the gravel shoulder. We fishtailed. My father, my brother, and I were all in the back. My father grabbed us and tried to brace himself with his legs and back between the two walls of the truck bed. He thought we were going to roll.

When the truck stopped, my father got out. My mother was crying. My father hugged her for a long time on the side of the freeway, with cars whizzing by and the truck rocking when semis passed, and then she climbed in the back with my brother and me and went to sleep. Her face was wet and warm.

The second time was in Nebraska. I know it was Nebraska because at the last rest stop, my mother had said:

“God, I hate Nebraska.”

The radio wouldn't tune in. The sky got cloudy and it began to rain. The wind blew hard and it whistled through the gaps in the windows of the camper. My father banged on the window and my mother pulled over under an overpass. The wind got stronger and the truck rocked and my father said:

“It'll be okay, storms this bad don't last long. Everything will be okay.”

And then the rear window of the camper shell popped open and empty chip bags and old newspapers flew out and rain rushed in with hard drops that stung me. My father tried to shut the window but he couldn't get a good hold and water and wind slapped his face and the window stayed open until the storm passed.

********

I wonder if my father remembered that overpass when he drove under it not long ago, after the divorce, on his way back to Pennsylvania.

********

The night I found out about the divorce went like this:

It was late. I was a little drunk and trying to write a paper. My brother called. He didn't know what was going on.

“I think Dad wants to talk to you.”

Dad was drunk too.

“It’s okay,” he said. “Everything's okay.”

“What's going on, Dad?”

“Nothing. Nothing to worry about. Everything’s okay.”

And we talked like that for a while and I knew before he told me but I kept asking anyway.

“I got the papers at work,” he said. “They actually laughed. The cocksuckers laughed. Big joke.  Smitty's wife gave him the ax.”

“Are you okay, Dad?”

“I'll be fine. But what about the kids?”

That night I drove a borrowed car the two hundred miles from here to there. The dash lights didn't work and I held a flashlight in my lap to make sure I had enough gas and that I wasn't overheating.

Nobody expected me. When I got there the house was dark. It was two in the morning. I walked up the driveway towards the back door and I smelled cigarettes and my father said:

“Hey, kiddo.”

He was smoking and drinking, sitting in the cab of the truck. The truck we drove here in. The truck he would drive back in a few months.

“What are you doing here?”

I told him I thought I could help iron things out.

“Not this time. Nope. It's as good as done.”  Then he took a drag and a swig and he said:

“What about the kids?”

“Don't worry. Everything will be okay.” And I hugged him like I thought it would help and I went in and slept on the couch.

When I left the next morning he was still in the truck but he was sitting behind the wheel. He said he wanted to pack all their stuff up and take the kids before mom woke up. I told him that was a bad idea. I told him to take care of himself, to go to work and try not to think about it. He mussed my hair and smiled.

“Thanks for coming,” he said. “Everything will be okay.”

I left without seeing anyone else. Thanksgiving was in two weeks. I didn't go back up even though they all spent it together. I told them I had to work.

********

That was the last time I was at the house. My mother and father both moved out after the divorce. My mom rented it out to the neighbors' daughter.

********

I told my father about the fire. How the woman, who was renting it, whom my mother was trying to kick out for not paying the rent, took a mason jar from the shed, filled it with gas, and lit it on fire. How she called the cops and said someone else did it while she was hanging out laundry. Snuck in while she was out back. It was actually the cop who set the house on fire. He panicked when he saw the jar and kicked it over. The carpet caught. The paint melted off the walls. And the couch cushions exploded. He gutted the house. My father said:

“It's concrete,” and laughed.

And it’s true: the house was made of concrete. The walls, the floor, the ceiling. All concrete. The walls sweated in the summer and radiated cold in the winter. The house was an experiment that didn’t work. A house shouldn’t be built out of concrete.

The thought of someone trying to burn down a concrete house made my father laugh. He didn't understand that it was gutted. And that that really was the same thing as being burned down. That someone else living there was really the same thing. He thought of it as my mom's house. He didn't understand.

********

Besides being gutted the house is a mess. The grass is long and yellow. There are huge pools of oil under a junk car with no wheels in the driveway. The above ground pool in the backyard is mostly empty and its sides are sagging.

The woman my mom rented it to is in jail. She has two children and I can feel her mother glare at me from next door. When I look she's not there. She might not even be home.

The house was still full with a lot of our things when it burned. My mom left it better than fully furnished and everywhere I look I see things I hadn't thought about in a long time charred and ruined and then I pick them up and place them in a black plastic garbage bag. In the room I used to share with my brother the bunk beds still stand but they are charred and the mattresses are burned through the middle like whoever was sleeping on them burned from the inside out. Smoldered, then burst, and finally burned through.

Most of the things in here are not mine. Just the bed and the desk. The desk is charred and the top has been carved. Initials I don't know. I open the drawers and nothing in them has been harmed. Inside, returned spelling tests and book reports with OKs and smiles on them. They aren’t mine.

My mother's new husband is going through with a snow shovel, scraping along the floor, and making a big pile of ash in the living room. Dust from the ash swirls in the air and covers our clothes, our hands, and our faces. I expected the ashes to be warm but they aren’t. They are cold and soft.

After a while my mother goes to get us some sandwiches for lunch. We eat them on the picnic table out back with cleaned hands and dirty faces. My mother tells me that someone offered to buy the property. They want to build a MiniMart in the house’s place.

“It’s not worth fixing up anymore,” my mother says.

It makes sense. The house is on the edge of town. The MiniMart would be the first thing people saw when they came in and the last thing when they left. There would be a beer cooler where my bed used to be. I don’t want her to want to sell. 

The pool stands behind Mom and her husband, with folded sides and weeds growing through the liner. I remember when we got it. It was the August before I went to high school. My father got it cheap because it was so late in the season. We put it up ourselves. It was dusk by the time we finished but the time between day and night is long in Northern California in the summertime. So we stayed out. The floor of the pool was lumpy and uneven and my father watched as we marched around waiting for it to be filled by two garden hoses. My mother came out, said our dinner was getting cold. C'mon. Get out now. You can wait ‘til tomorrow. And my father came from behind her, lifted her and threw her in. But she held onto him and he was pulled in with her. The side of the pool flexed under their weight but it held and we splashed and chased each other around, screaming and laughing until we were tired and the pool was full and water overflowed the top. Then we leaned back against the edge and watched the stars of the warm night and the glowing, floating ashes from the burning rice fields over the levee.