He laughed too, and waving his arms to clear the smoke, stepped over to the stove, preparing himself for the damage. Aligning expectations: the fire had been constrained to the stove, thank God. It would be totaled, the microwave above it as well. The back wall would need fresh drywall, and the whole kitchen would need a coat of paint. He expected all of those things.

What he didn’t expect to see, amid mounds of flour piled like snowdrifts, was five neatly banded bundles of hundred-dollar bills.

WHEN TOM SAID HER NAME, Anna had just turned on the faucet to wash the flour off her hands. She had her back to him, and the quiet way he said it scared her.

She turned, saw him at the stove, thought maybe he’d been burned, or that the fire had done more damage than they’d realized. Then she followed his pointing finger.

Packets of money lay in the flour.

The incongruity was startling. Money was something you took care of, folded, kept in a wallet. A dollar bill on the sidewalk leapt to your eye like it was lit by neon. To see bundles of money, bundles, the faded green dusty with flour, that chubby portrait of Benjamin Franklin staring up… it made something in her tilt.

“Jesus.” She stepped beside him. Together they looked down. Her mind was racing, trying to connect dots that didn’t seem like they belonged in the same zip code. There was a grease fire. They dumped flour on it. Now thousands of dollars lay on the stove. Alchemy.

She reached out, picked up one of the bundles. Soft and worn and, in the pack of a hundred, heavier than she would have guessed. She rifled the edge with her thumb, and a faint trace of flour leapt up. A hundred hundreds, ten grand. More cash than she had ever held. About two months of paychecks. With the other bundles, nine months’ worth of work. Of twelve-hour days, of voice mail and sleepless nights and conference room battles. Nine months in a bag of flour dumped on a fire. The thought seized her, and she grabbed the rest of the money, her fingers suddenly greedy.

“What are you doing?”

She held twenty grand in one hand, thirty in the other. “In case the fire starts again.” It was true, that had been her intention, just to get the money and then set it on the counter. But she found she didn’t really want to let it go. Looked up at Tom, saw his eyes wide, his mouth open half an inch. After twelve, thirteen years together, she could see the thoughts working across his face, the same equation that was playing in hers. The same questions. “The stove was on when we came in.”

“Yeah. I think that’s how the fire started.” He paused. “Maybe he left, forgot he turned it on?”

She pointed to the mug and the jar of instant. “He started making a cup of coffee and then left?”

“He could have gotten a phone call, something he had to run out for.”

She nodded. Moved to the counter, set the money down. “Maybe.” Something in her chest was cold. “But maybe we ought to check around.”

“Check around for-” He stopped. Looked back down the hall toward the two bedrooms. For a moment, they looked at each other, their eyes locked, the unspoken possibility hanging between them. Then Tom walked to the window and opened it. “We should get rid of this smoke anyway.”

It was a flimsy cover, but it was something to cling to. They started with the spare bedroom. The door was open, though the room was black. She hesitated, then reached in and flicked the light switch. Bright overheads revealed a weight bench and a set of cast-iron plates, a portable radio and a tin ashtray overflowing with butts. Inanely, her first thought was that they had told him the building was nonsmoking, that he had to do it outside. That was about the only time they saw him, smoking out on the porch, but apparently it wasn’t the only time he did it. Tom opened that window too, and they moved down the hall to the master bedroom.

She knew before Tom flipped on the light. Knew, in truth, back in the kitchen. So when she saw, she didn’t jump or shriek or do any of the things useless women did in the movies.

The bedroom was as spare as the rest of the house. A small dresser. A night table: reading lamp, paperback, clock, crammed ashtray, prescription bottle. A queen-size mattress and box spring, no headboard, the blankets faded with age. And Bill Samuelson, his skin pale, lips pursed tight together, curled on his side with his hands against his stomach like he had a bellyache.

The first and last time Anna had seen a dead body was at her grandfather’s funeral. She was eleven, and remembered feeling nothing at all as she followed her mother up to look in the coffin. No, that wasn’t true – her mother was crying, something Anna rarely saw, and that tore her heart out. But the man in the velvet box, the one with the too-rosy cheeks and the concrete expression, she didn’t feel anything for him. He wasn’t her grandfather. Her grandfather was a jovial man, a cardplayer, a scotch drinker, a joke teller. The man in the box was just… absent.

“Christ.” Tom spoke softly.

They stood for a moment in the hallway, as if death were a force field, something that filled space. The body on the bed looked, not peaceful exactly, but sort of calm. Resigned. That was the word. He looked resigned, like a man ready to take his punishment. She stared, the air sticky with grease and smoke, listening to the steady beat of the clock, tick tick tick. Measuring out her time, and Tom’s. Their lives subject to the same inane rhythm.

When she stepped in, the floor squeaked like a laugh in church. She froze, then continued. Reached out one hand, slowly. His chest was still, she could see perfectly well that he wasn’t breathing, but she needed to know, needed to feel it to believe it. The skin of his arm was cool. Not cold, though. Not too long ago he’d been alive. An hour, maybe? Was that all that separated the two worlds, his and hers? An hour?

Tick tick tick.

“I guess we should call someone.” Tom’s voice sounding far away.

She pulled her hand from the body, nodded.

The worst of the smoke had cleared from the kitchen, replaced by a chilly spring breeze. The money was on the counter where she’d left it, beside the telephone.

“How do you suppose it happened?”

Tom shook his head. “I don’t know. Heart attack? Stroke?”

“He didn’t seem that old.”

“My uncle had one when he was forty-two. Bill was probably older than that.”

She picked up one of the bundles of money, tapped it idly against the counter. “I guess you’re right. Maybe he had a condition.”

He nodded slowly. “There was a prescription bottle.”

“God.” She shivered. “He died all alone. No family, no friends. Not even a doctor. Just alone in his bedroom.”

“Bad way to go.” Tom lined up one bundle of money against another. “But I don’t know. Maybe that’s the way he would have wanted. Seemed like the way he lived. Kind of a hermit.”

They fell silent, both of them staring at the counter, at the money and the telephone. The breeze through the open window was rich with the promise of storm, that sweet electric smell of spring. An idea was forming in her head, hatching slowly, and she was letting it. Not nurturing it, but not quashing it, either. Just giving it space.

She brushed a lock of hair behind her ear. “It’s like one of those stories you read about.”

“Which ones?”

“You know, ‘News of the Weird’ kinds of stories. The guy who lives alone in a transient hotel. The neighbors say he was quiet, never had any visitors. One day there’s a bad smell. When they break down the door, they find a bankbook with a million-dollar balance.”

He laughed. “And a hundred boxes of Kraft mac and cheese.”

“And seventeen cats.” It was morbid, to be joking, here, in a dead man’s kitchen. But it felt good too. Reminded her she was alive, that she stood against the endless ticking.