She pushes her beans around her plate. "Saving Third World countries, splitting a few atoms, and finishing up the Great American Novel. In between dialysis, of course."

"Of course."

Sara turns around, brandishing a knife. "Whatever I did," I say, shrinking away, "I'm sorry."

She ignores me. "Carve the roast, will you?"

I take the carving utensils and slice into the roast beef just as Jesse sloughs into the kitchen. We allow him to live over the garage, but he is required to eat with us; it's part of the bargain. His eyes are devil-red; his clothes are ringed with sweet smoke. "Look at that," Sara-sighs, but when I turn, she is staring at the roast. "It's too rare." She picks the pan up with her bare hands, as if her skin is coated with asbestos. She sticks the beef back into the oven.

Jesse reaches for a bowl of mashed potatoes and begins to heap them onto his plate. More, and more, and more again.

"You reek," Kate says, waving her hand in front of her face.

Jesse ignores her, taking a bite of his potatoes. I wonder what it says about me, that I am actually thrilled I can identify pot running through his system, as opposed to some of the others-Ecstasy, heroin, and God knows what else—which leave less of a trace.

"Not all of us enjoy Eau de Stoned," Kate mutters.

"Not all of us can get our drugs through a portacath," Jesse answers.

Sara holds up her hands. "Please. Could we just… not?"

"Where's Anna?" Kate asks.

"Wasn't she in your room?"

"Not since this morning."

Sara sticks her head through the kitchen door. "Anna! Dinner!"

"Look at what I bought today," Kate says, plucking at her T-shirt. It is a psychedelic tie-dye, with a crab on the front, and the word Cancer. "Get it?"

"You're a Leo." Sara looks like she is on the verge of tears.

"How's that roast coming?" I ask, to distract her.

Just then, Anna enters the kitchen. She throws herself into her chair and ducks her head. "Where have you been?" Kate says.

"Around." Anna looks down at her plate, but makes no effort to serve herself.

This is not Anna. I am used to struggling with Jesse, to lightening Kate's load; but Anna is our family's constant. Anna comes in with a smile. Anna tells us about the robin she found with a broken wing and a blush on its cheek; or about the mother she saw at Wal-Mart with not one but two sets of twins. Anna gives us a backbeat, and seeing her sitting there unresponsive makes me realize that silence has a sound.

"Something happen today?" I ask.

She looks up at Kate, assuming the question has been put to her sister, and then startles when she realizes I am talking to her. "No."

"You feel okay?"

Again, Anna does a double take; this is a question we usually reserve for Kate.

"Fine."

"Because you're, you know, not eating."

Anna looks down on her plate, notices that it's empty, and then heaps it high with food. She shovels green beans into her mouth, two forkfuls.

Out of the blue I remember when the kids were little, crammed into the back of the car like cigars wedged in a box, and I would sing to them. Anna anna bo banna, banana fanna fo fanna, me my mo manna… Anna. ("Chuck," Jesse would yell out. "Do Chuck!")

"Hey." Kate points to Anna's neck. "Your locket's missing."

It's the one I gave her, years ago. Anna's hand comes up to her collarbone. "Did you lose it?" I ask.

She shrugs. "Maybe I'm just not in the mood to wear it."

She's never taken it off, far as I know. Sara pulls the roast out of the oven and sets it on the table. As she picks up the knife to carve, she looks over at Kate. "Speaking of things we're not in the mood to wear," she says, "go put on another shirt."

"Why?"

"Because I said so."

'That's not a reason."

Sara spears the roast with the knife. "Because I find it offensive at the dinner table."

"It's not any more offensive than Jesse's metalhead shirts. What's the one you had on yesterday? Alabama Thunder Pussy?"

Jesse rolls his eyes toward her. It's an expression I've seen before: the horse in a spaghetti Western, gone lame, the moment before it's shot for mercy.

Sara saws through the meat. Pink before, now it is an overcooked log. "Now look," she says. "It's ruined."

"It's fine." I take the one piece she has managed to dissect from the rest and cut a smaller bite. I might as well be chewing leather. "Delicious. I'm just gonna run down to the station and get a blowtorch so that we can serve everyone else."

Sara blinks, and then a laugh bubbles out of her. Kate giggles. Even Jesse cracks a smile.

This is when I realize that Anna has already left the table, and more importantly, that nobody noticed.

Back at the station, the four of us sit upstairs in the kitchen. Red's got some kind of sauce going on the stove; Paulie reads the ProJo, and Caesar's writing a letter to this week's object of lust. Watching him, Red shakes his head. "You ought to just keep that filed on disk and print multiple copies at a time."

Caesar's just a nickname. Paulie coined it years ago, because he's always roamin'. "Well, this one's different," Caesar says.

"Yeah. She's lasted two whole days." Red pours the pasta into the colander in the sink, steam rising up around his face. "Fitz, give the boy some pointers, will you?"

"Why me?"

Paulie glances up over the rim of the paper. "Default," he says, and it's true. Paulie's wife left him two years ago for a cellist who'd swung through Providence on a symphony tour; Red's such a confirmed bachelor he wouldn't know what a lady was if she came up and bit him. On the other hand, Sara and I have been married twenty years.

Red sets a plate down in front of me as I start to talk. "A woman," I say, "isn't all that different from a bonfire."

Paulie tosses down the paper and hoots. "Here we go: the Tao of Captain Fitzgerald."

I ignore him. "A fire's a beautiful thing, right? Something you can't take your eyes off, when it's burning. If you can keep it contained, it'll throw light and heat for you. Its only when it gets out of control that you have to go on the offensive."

"What Cap is trying to tell you," Paulie says, "is that you need to keep your date away from crosswinds. Hey, Red, you got any Parmesan?"

We sit down to my second dinner, which usually means that the bells will ring within minutes. Firefighting is a world of Murphy's Law; it is when you can least afford a crisis that one crops up.

"Hey, Fitz, do you remember the last dead guy who got stuck?" Paulie asks. "Back when we were vollies?"

God, yes. A fellow who weighed five hundred pounds if he weighed an ounce, who'd died of heart failure in his bed. The fire department had been called in on that one by the funeral home, which couldn't get the body downstairs. "Ropes and pulleys," I recall out loud.

"And he was supposed to be cremated, but he was too big…" Paulie grins. "Swear to God, as my mother's up in Heaven, they had to take him to a vet instead."

Caesar blinks up at him. "What for?"

"How do you think they get rid of a dead horse, Einstein?"

Putting two and two together, Caesar's eyes widen. "No kidding," he says, and on second thought, pushes away Red's pasta Bolognese.

"Who do you think they'll ask to clean out the med school chimney?" Red says.

"The poor OSHA bastards," Paulie answers.

'Ten bucks says they call here and tell us it's our job."

"There won't be any call," I say, "because there won't be anything left to clean out. That fire was burning too hot."

"Well, at least we know this one wasn't arson," Paulie mutters.

In the past month, we have had a rash of fires set intentionally. You can always tell—there will be splash patterns of flammable liquid, or multiple points of origin, or smoke that burns black, or an unusual concentration of fire in one spot. Whoever is doing this is smart, too—at several structures the combustibles have been put beneath stairs, to cut off our access to the flames. Arson fires are dangerous because they don't follow the science we use to combat them. Arson fires are the structures most likely to collapse around you while you're inside fighting them.