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“Mel, Lou, can I trust you both to go find us sticks?”
Louisa looks longingly at the patterned blanket she’d already draped over a lawn chair, but Melanie catches her by the hand. “Yeah, we got it,” she says. As she drags Louisa towards the back fence, she hisses, “Do you want s’mores or not?”
“Thank you,” Bernice calls after them. “And Martha, honey, could you go get us the marshmallows and stuff? Toni here can help me with the fire.”
“Sure, Mom.” Martha stands up and heads in, widening her eyes at Toni as she passes. The screen door bounces shut behind her.
With her gone, the dark nestles closer around them. The fire laps at the small scraps of bark that Bernice feeds it.
Unbidden, words rise in Toni’s throat. They slip out from between her teeth before she can catch them. “That birchbark?”
Bernice looks at her. “No,” she says. “It’s cedar.” She shuffles the long strips between her fingers. “Yeah. Cedar. It’s brown, see?” She passes a piece to Toni.
Toni rubs her thumb along the thin, coarse length. “Right. Birchbark’s white.”
“Yep. And it comes off in these beautiful sheets.”
Toni nods, head still down. The piece of bark turns, turns, turns in her hands.
She can feel Bernice’s eyes on her. “Why do you ask?”
Toni shrugs. She wishes Bernice had given her a real chore, or at least had let her tag along with Martha. She knows it was meant as a kindness, but she would much rather be throwing a marshmallow into Martha’s waiting mouth than sitting here, staring at the twisting flames and feeling an answering twist inside her own chest.
Bernice adds more tinder to the fire, then leans over and picks up some heavier kindling. She holds it out to Toni. Toni takes it.
“Put it where it’ll follow the shape that’s already there.”
The other sticks lean together in a rough cone. Toni fits the new one in between two of the fuel logs and watches red and yellow tongues reach out to taste it. She sets the cedar bark near the base. It curls with heat.
“Pretty, huh?”
She nods.
“You’re quiet tonight.”
She manages a grimace. “Yeah, sorry.”
“No need to be sorry. With this crew–” Bernice gestures out to Mel and Louisa, shadows splashing against the fence as they play fight with stick swords– “we could use a little quiet around here.” She pauses. “Besides. I’ve known you long enough to see when your head’s a bit busy.”
Toni glances at her.
Her lips quirk, wry and warm. “You’re not exactly hard to read.”
Self-deprecating humor sands down the edge of her tone. “Guess not.”
Bernice’s eyes crinkle. “So,” she says. “Birchbark.”
Toni sucks on her bottom lip.
“You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to, but that’s one of the first things you’ve said unprompted all night. Get the feeling there’s a story there.”
“Yeah.”
“I’ve always thought fires are a pretty good place for stories.”
“It, uh. You know Regan.”
Ms. Blackburn has met Regan, more than once. Still, her mouth doesn’t so much as twitch. Her gaze stays steady on Toni.
“I do.”
“That night that– after the parking lot–” Her voice, already rough, cracks. Her eyes stick on the embers, crumbled and glowing. “When she. You know. Dumped my ass. She said her mom called me birchbark. Highly flammable, or whatever.”
Bernice waits.
“I thought her mom liked me. But shitty part is, she’s right.”
“She is?”
“I know Martha told you about the car.”
She inclines her head.
Toni scuffs her sneakers against the grass. “Yeah.”
They sit for a moment, quiet only broken by Martha’s sisters’ chatter, the chirruping of crickets, and the crackling of the fire.
“There are worse things to be called, you know.”
Toni glances up, defensive.
Bernice clocks the shift in her posture. “I just mean that birch is so versatile. The bark is great tinder, sure. But it can also be used for canoes, baskets, paper—lots of stuff. You and Martha went to that heritage workshop a few years back, you’ve seen what I mean. Fire isn’t always bad,” she lays a few more pieces of kindling on theirs, as if to demonstrate, “but birch isn’t good for just burning.”
The words hang between them.
“Cool,” Toni says. “I’ll, uh, let my teachers know I can’t come to school anymore, since I’ll be starting my new life as a sick basket.”
She gives her a fond look. “Alright, alright.”
Toni shrugs one shoulder.
“I don’t mean to take away from how much that must’ve hurt,” Bernice continues. “But birchbark is pretty special, in my books. I’ll always have a place for it in my home.”
A lump rises in Toni’s throat. “Thanks, Ms. Black– Bernice. Thanks.”
“Anytime, Toni. I mean it.”
“Mom, we got the sticks!” Mel and Louisa trudge back over, holding up their selection of DIY skewers.
“And no eyes were poked out?”
“All six of our eyes are still in their sockets.”
Louisa shoves Mel, firelight glinting off her glasses.
“Lay off your sister.” Bernice’s words have the absentminded note of frequent repetition. “Now where is…”
“Goodies, check,” Martha announces, coming up behind Toni with her hands full of their pantry stash. She flashes Toni a soft smile, and Toni knows implicitly that Martha had finished grabbing the supplies minutes ago but had been waiting out of view at the screen door for them to finish talking. Part of her wants to be mad—snoop, much?—but she can’t. It’s Marty.
“Auntie Kate isn’t coming tonight, right?” Louisa asks. She settles into her chair.
“No,” says Bernice. “She and Auntie P drove up to Red Lake yesterday. And Auntie Glenda’s babysitting Jocelyn, and she promised her a movie marathon.”
“Do we have to wait for Dad?”
“Let’s give him five more minutes.”
“Okay,” Louisa grumbles.
The wind changes slightly, and the smoke pushes in Mel’s direction. She sticks out her finger in front of her. “I hate bunnies! I hate bunnies, I hate bunnies, I hate bunnies!”
Martha’s head snaps around so fast it makes a pop. “What?”
“Some kids in class told me saying that makes the smoke go away.”
“How long has Cappy been part of this family? Go apologize to him right now.”
“Sorry, Cappy,” Mel says, rolling her eyes.
Martha still looks affronted on behalf of her rabbit, but Toni bites back a grin.
Louisa leans forward. “Mom, you’ll never believe what Bree did in class today.”
“Oh?”
Eagerly, Louisa leaps into her story. It starts with her being sent to the class next door to pick up something her own class has run out of, meanders into her thoughts about the teacher from next door, picks back up with a description of which kid Bree is—at which point Martha pulls out her fingers and challenges Toni to a match of chopsticks—and ends with her saying, “And it turned green, Mom! Her hand turned green where the pencil went in!”
“Green?” Mel asks.
Toni lets Marty beat her, three of her fingers tapping her last two standing. The warmth of her touch settles in her chest. She puts her hands down and smiles at Louisa across their little fire circle. “No way.”
“Yes way. Ms. Graves called the nurse to tell her she was coming and I asked her why she didn’t tell her it was green and she said, ‘They’ll find out soon, right?’"
Martha snorts. Bernice shakes her head, a gentle smile on her face.
Mel reaches for Louisa. “Ooh, we should stab your thumb like that! That way you’ll really have a green thumb like everybody says. C’mon, give it.”
“Mel,” Bernice reprimands, but there’s more mirth than bite behind it.
“No!” Louisa squeals. She stows her hands under her armpits.
The back door squeaks open. “Gonna be kind of hard to roast marshmallows with no hands, isn’t it?”
“Dad!”
“You’re home!”
“Finally!”
“Hey, girls.” He comes up behind Bernice and rests his hands on her shoulders. She smiles up at him. “Didn’t mean to make you wait, just got held up.”
Toni can see his worn posture, the tired creases of his face. He works long hours—so long sometimes that she doesn’t see him for days. He tries to be home for Saturday nights, though, even if just to slip in through the gate and split a pop with the next-door neighbor. Tonight, with the backyard missing half the relations that usually crowd it, he gets a special reception as a guest of honor.
He kisses Martha on the top of the head as he walks by. She tips her head back into his stomach when he straightens, a light knock of acknowledgement. His eyes crinkle. He moves to drop down in the chair next to his youngest daughters. They clamor over him.
“Make me a marshmallow?” Martha asks.
Toni turns to her. She’s going to say yes—she always says yes. Always sits carefully, slowly rotating Martha’s marshmallow over the embers until it toasts an even brown, perfectly gooey in the middle. But still, she says, “What, sure you don’t want a Blackburn Inferno Supreme?”
Martha rolls her eyes. “That’s your favorite.”
Toni shakes her head, corner of her mouth twitching. “Alright,” she says, holding out a hand, “chuck me one of Lou’s sticks.”
As she settles closer to the fire, she catches Bernice watching her. The older woman smiles. With the heat warming her face, Toni offers her a small smile back.