“Until the shells open. Five minutes. Then the sauce goes on. I wouldn’t start them until everybody else is here.” A couple of Adirondack chairs were pulled up to the firepit. I pulled one out of the stream of smoke.

“Who’s everybody else?”

“Poets. Their friends and allies.”

I waited for him to offer some opinion about weirdo poets, but he sat back in his chair and looked up at the canopy of trees shifting in the late-day breeze. “The fire jumped the lines. They have a warning out for Geyserville.”

“That’s still forty miles.” I meant, from Petaluma. It was closer than that to Santa Rosa and my mom.

He was peeling the label off the beer bottle. A nervous habit. “God, it stresses me out. And it goes on for months.”

“You have to try not to think about it every minute.” I didn’t want to think about it right now, with this particular evening ahead of us, but I could tell Aaron was working his way through something, the way he did in that big bald head, building up arguments until he convinced himself.

“You ever wonder about moving?” he asked, not entirely a change of subject, if you were paying attention.

“Moving where?”

“I don’t know. British Columbia, maybe. Vancouver. It’s a whole different climate.”

“It’s a whole different country.”

“Would that be so bad? Look at the shitstorm going on. California’s about the only sane state left. And it’s burning up. And nobody can afford to live here. I can get another IT job. They’re everywhere.”

“I thought I was going back to school.”

“They have schools in Vancouver, too. Okay, it doesn’t have to be Vancouver. Haven’t you thought about living someplace different? Someplace we haven’t been all our lives. A fresh start.”

The truth was, I hadn’t. But Aaron was four years older than me. He thought in terms of the future, of planning things out, while I was still, Whatever. He was right, he could get other jobs. And he wanted me to come with him, which told me something I needed to know. But it was his idea, not mine. And this was home. Why would you want to leave home?

“I don’t know,” I said. “It’s a lot to think about. It’s not so bad here. All right, the fires are kind of bad.”

“There’s times I just want something new.”

I didn’t answer. I’d thought that being in love with someone, as I was with Aaron, as I believed he was with me, made everything new every day. But I guess that wasn’t what Aaron meant. Then some of the guests arrived, and we didn’t have to take things any further.