Mom hasn’t told her about the fire, thought Macey. Did they have better things to talk about? Did they talk about the house and garden tour instead of me?

She felt two years old, wanting to be the center of her mother’s universe, the sole subject of her mother’s conversation. “I got caught in a teensy silly accidental fire. I let my hair hang down where I shouldn’t have.”

“Oh, no! Over the burner on the stove, or something?” cried Mrs. Framm.

“Exactly.”

“My darling, thank God you are all right!”

They talked about the struggle to sell house and garden tour tickets, and Macey said, “Mrs. Framm, do you remember your seventh-grade science teacher?”

“I was in boarding school in seventh grade. Why would you want to know about my boarding-school teachers?”

“Seventh grade? I thought boarding schools started in ninth.”

“Mostly they do. I started early.”

“Weren’t you homesick and lonely? Wasn’t it awful?”

“It was ghastly. Promise me you’ll never do it to your daughter.”

“I promise.”

“You were probably thinking of your mother’s seventh-grade science teacher. Mr. Sibley.” Mrs. Framm swayed and shook her head and rolled her eyes. She always did this, however, so it didn’t mean much. “What a thing that was. That was the whole reason I was sent to boarding school.”

A fire? thought Macey. She was sent to boarding school because of a fire?

Macey tasted her own fire, the horror of being suffocated. She had not known when cloth was pushed down over her head and eyes and ears and nose that there was a reason. She had known only that she was helpless and blind and running out of oxygen. She had fought and tried to scream, but part of the T-shirt got in her mouth and she’d choked on cotton and smoke.

If she’d been responsible for saving Aus, could she have thought and acted as fast as he had?

“You see,” said Ginger Framm, “my parents would have died before letting me sit in a classroom run by a Negro.”

Macey’s jaw fell open.

Mrs. Framm said, “Don’t look at me like that. You said Negro then, you didn’t say African American or black. And you considered yourself very civilized for not using a worse word. Anyway, Mr. Sibley was the first Negro teacher in town. The school system had never had a colored teacher before.”

Why hadn’t her mother said so? It was not something you could forget. If you remembered Mr. Sibley at all, you’d remember that.

Austin’s grandmother “vaguely” remembered the barn fire. And Nana had said, Every flame the same as the next.

The first black teacher in town? Living in the apartment over the stable down the street? And it burned down? And they couldn’t remember?