“Well, nobody asked them to.”

“Carla? Are you going to tell me what’s wrong?”

“The fire was my fault.” I watched the cars going by on the overpass. Across the street was an Italian restaurant with people eating dinner. I wanted to be one of them, somebody who had never heard of poetry.

“That’s completely dumb. It was an accident. Or it was at least my fault, too. We were both doing the grilling.”

“I told Oscar he shouldn’t be lighting fires. I made a point of it. And here I’m the one who practically burned the house down.”

“Would you stop talking like that?” I guessed he was outside. His end of the line had a windy sound. “Nobody thinks it was your fault. Are you at home? I’ll get there as soon as I can.”

“I’m going to stay at my mom’s tonight. I’m not mad at you. It’s okay if you’re mad at me. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

I hung up. I waited to see if he’d try to call me back, but he didn’t.

It was late, past ten, when I got to my mom’s house. At least she hadn’t gone to bed yet, so I didn’t feel quite as bad, showing up with no warning. She opened the door and said, “For God’s sake, Carla,” which told me how gnarly I must have looked.

“What happened?” was her first question, and the one after that was, “Why do you smell like smoke?”

I started crying. Total meltdown. She hugged me, smoke and soot and all, and told me it was all right, all right. What can I say. She was my mom.

She led me to the couch and let me cry a while longer. She brought me Kleenex, a damp washcloth, a 7 Up in a glass. When I’d calmed down a little, she said, “Did something happen with Aaron? Did you have a fight? Did he—”

“He didn’t do anything.” I’d reached the nose-blowing part of crying and it took me a lot of Kleenex to clean myself up. My mom waited for me to finish. She was wearing her blue quilted bathrobe and her hair was pulled back in a headband so she could do her nightly facial routine. When I stopped crying enough to get words out, I said, “I did something really stupid and I had to get away.”

“Are you going to tell me what it was?”

“It doesn’t matter. Why am I such a loser?” I was sniffling again.

“Who called you that?”

“I did. It’s true.”

“Not true.”

“I’m never going to do anything right! Anything important. I’m going to spend my life working at some dumb job and hanging out with dumb people and die watching television.”