“Well, then I’d go in. I’d go in and get you.”

“You wouldn’t take things, would you? Would you take things from me?”

“I wouldn’t even think about it. I’d get you and we’d get away from the fire as fast as we could. That’s what you have to do.”

“And you wouldn’t call the firemen?”

“We’d have to call them,” I said. “They’d have to put out the fire.”

“I suppose,” she said and thought about it some more.

“They’re not like the ones you saw before,” I said. “They’re like the ones we saw today. They didn’t take anything, did they?”

“I guess not.”

“Besides, your house isn’t going to be on fire. You’re going to be careful.”

“Mom’s not careful, though. And her friends. They’re not careful.”

“They will be,” I said. “Tell them to be careful.”

“Okay,” Eva said.

It was time for her to go back to her mother. On the drive back I thought how it was almost as if I had taken Eva to work with me. We sat in a car and watched a house. She was the one who thought about robbing it. That’s what you get for making an effort. She was quiet on the ride back and barely said goodbye to me when we got to the apartment door. She hugged her mother and went into another room. I wasn’t invited inside.

“She’s tired,” Denise said. “I can tell. You must have walked her all over the park.”

“We never made it,” I said. “She wanted to watch some firemen working.”

“She must have loved that.”

“She did. She had a lot of questions.”

“She has a lot of questions.”

“She wanted to know if the firemen were going to rob the place. She told me she saw it on TV.”

Denise laughed. “She did see it on TV,” she said. “The other night on The Simpsons.”

I laughed. “She had me thinking it was real.”

“She had you thinking,” Denise said.

“Not like that. No judgment”

“Yeah, I know how that’s a one-way street for you.”

I shouldn’t have told her. Now we were at a place where we couldn’t say anything. I thought I’d done all right, but Denise wasn’t so happy about it now, all of a sudden. Fuck it, I thought. I don’t need to see her.

“Okay then,” I said and left, and spent the rest of the time thinking about Eva and how I wanted to see her.

—