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.This will go in my arsonist's guide, too."Where did my mother go just now?" I finally asked, picking what I hoped was an innocuous question that Anne Marie would be willing to answer.She did."She went to work.""Work?" I said."Where's that?"Here something odd happened: the smoke poured out of Anne Marie's mouth and she smiled at me, like a softhearted dragon."You'll never guess where she works," Anne Marie said."I probably won't," I admitted."She works at the Student Prince," Anne Marie said.The Student Prince was the German restaurant in Springfield that Anne Marie and I had lived above when we were first married.I knew now why she was smiling at me: she was remembering that happy time, our first child, our first home, the early, best stages of our love.This is not to say that love endures, but that the memory of it does, even ― or especially ― if we don't want it to."What a coincidence," I said."It's not a coincidence," Anne Marie said, and then before I could ask her what she meant, she threw her spent cigarette in the snow and said, "You'll have to ask her yourself.""OK.""Your mother's a good woman, Sam," she told me."She deserves better than your father.""I know.""She deserves better than you, too.""I know that," I said.For the first time, I was thinking of what I'd done to my mother and not what I thought she'd done to me.She deserved a better son than me, a better person than me.This is another way you know you've become a grown-ass man, when you realize ― too late, too late ― that you're not worthy of the woman who made you one.Of the women who made you one."Your mother is afraid that you set fire to those writers' houses," Anne Marie said, and then she named them: the Bellamy and Twain houses.She didn't mention the Robert Frost Place.This probably meant my mother had stopped following me after she'd seen me kissing the woman in the bar, which was too bad: if she'd followed me to the Robert Frost Place, then she'd have known I didn't torch it, and she'd also have seen who did."She's worried about you.""I didn't set fire to any writer's house," I said."Except for the one," Anne Marie said."And that was an accident," I said."I don't want to hear it," she said."A woman set fire to the Bellamy and Twain houses," I went on."What woman?""I don't know yet," I said."But I'm pretty sure Thomas has an idea.""Sam.Anne Marie said.I could hear the exasperation in her voice, so beautiful and familiar, but sad, too, like hearing church bells right before your funeral.I should have stopped talking right then, but I didn't, and my words were like the snow, which kept falling and falling even though too much of it had fallen already."And then the bond analysts burned down the Robert Frost Place.""The what? And who?" Anne Marie said, and then before I could answer, she said, "Forget it.I don't want to hear about any fucking bond analysts.I don't want to hear about anything anymore.""But Anne Marie," I said, "it's true.""Oh, Sam," Anne Marie said."Why don't you take some responsibility for once?""For burning down those houses?""For everything," she said.Then she turned around and walked through the snow back to Thomas's Jeep.I didn't chase after her, didn't call out to her, didn't tell her to come back, come back.Talking had gotten me into nothing but trouble.Maybe the best way to get Anne Marie to come back was just to stand there in the snow and not say anything and wait for her.It worked, too.She spun her wheels in the snow, did a ragged three-point turn, and pointed the Jeep in my direction.Come back to me, I said in my head.Come back to me.And she did.Anne Marie pulled up right next to me, reached across the front seat, rolled down the passenger side window, and said, "You're going to go see your mother, aren't you?"I admitted that I probably was."Then you should go home and change first," she said."Shower, too.You look terrible, Sam.You don't smell so good, either." And then she rolled up the window and drove away.23As everyone knows, you can't go home again.That famous book told us so, even if it took way too many pages to do it.But what that book didn't tell us, and mine will, is that you can't go home again even to change your clothes and shower before meeting your mother at the Student Prince, because if you do, you'll find Detective Wilson sitting at your dining room table, waiting for you.He was baggy eyed and armed with another large coffee, the way I was baggy eyed and armed with another large beer, which is just further proof that all men are but slight variations on the very same theme."You don't seem surprised to see me," he said."I'm not," I said.Because I wasn't: after all, there had been so many non-Pulsifers showing up at my home the last few days that I'd have to expand the definition of home to include people who didn't actually live there, in addition to the people who were supposed to live there but didn't."I'm not surprised at all," I told him.I raised my bagged beer in toast, then sat down across the table from him.Between us was a bulky manila envelope that I figured was mail for one of my parents."You've been busy, Sam," Detective Wilson said.He took several envelopes out of his jacket pocket, withdrew pieces of paper from each envelope, and then spread them on the dining room table, covering the manila envelope.The pieces of paper and the envelope looked dirty, torn, abused, and I was pretty sure I knew what they were without reading them, even though I did read them, if for no other reason than to buy myself a little time.They were the rest of my father's missing letters, from people who wanted me to burn down these writers' houses: Edith Wharton's, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's, and Nathaniel Hawthorne's, as well as a replica log cabin at Henry David Thoreau's Walden Pond.The letter writers had gotten what they wanted, too: someone had burned down all those houses the night before, one after the other, and someone had then left the pertinent letter near the place where the house had just been.Detective Wilson told me this as I pretended to read the letters.I knew the bond analysts had done the burning, of course ― I could picture their route south from New Hampshire and east toward Boston as they burned, could hear Morgan saying, He'll be sorry, as he produced and planted the letters.I should have told Detective Wilson about the bond analysts; I should have produced Morgan's book and the postcards and then explained their reasons for burning these houses and framing me.Then I would have gone on and admitted to Detective Wilson that I didn't know any of the bond analysts' last names except for Morgan's, nor did I know exactly where in Boston they lived.But Anne Marie hadn't wanted to hear about the bond analysts, and I could imagine Detective Wilson reacting the same way, could imagine him agreeing with the Writer-in-Residence: he would clearly think the whole thing was a cheap trick, and that the bond analysts didn't sound like real people.So instead of telling him the whole truth, I told the simplest part of it ― "It wasn't me" ― and then slid the letters back toward him."Yes, it was," Detective Wilson said.He put the letters back in their envelopes and returned them to his coat pocket.I looked down at the table where the letters had just been.There was that manila envelope.I looked at it rather than at Detective Wilson and noticed what I hadn't before: in the upper left-hand corner, in official letterhead style, it read: "Wesley Mincher, English Department, Heiden College, Hartford, CT 06106." There was no postmark on the envelope, no proper mailing address, either, but there was, in the middle of the envelope, in big block letters so you couldn't miss it, my name: "SAM [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]