“Can—” I started. I cleared my throat. “Can I get back to you on that? I’ve—I guess I’ve got a family thing I should go to.”

“For sure,” he said. “Anytime outside of usual school or work hours.”

I might have flinched in a way that he saw, hearing that. I knew why he’d said it, but it still sucked to hear.

I started to walk away.

“Victoria,” he said.

“Yeah?”

“Any favor you need, reference letter, intel, if you need Jasper or some other trustworthy faces in uniform to lend a hand with something…”

“Thank you,” I said, my voice lighter and more cheerful than I felt. “I’ll be in touch.”

I took off.

⊙

There was something very human about the desire to gather around a fire. Power rationing meant every household had only a certain amount, more if there were more people in the house. Conversely, there was a lot of cheap firewood. Streetlights flickered on, and many house lights went off. In back yards there were three other families on the city block that were gathering around fire pits. Two of the families were playing different kinds of music, but it wasn’t too discordant. There were trees in each yard, front and back, and that helped to dampen the sound.

The entire street smelled like burning charcoal, and the light from the streetlights was just a little bit hazy with the ambient smoke.

It was a nice neighborhood, even if it had what I felt was the artificial quality. Houses with character, sufficiently different from one another in style and architecture, but still so new that they looked more like movie sets than lived-in places. Time and clutter would wear at those crisp edges. Paint and attention would turn fences of new wood with the occasional edge still frayed from the saw’s touch into something more personal.

This was the flip side to the hostility and the street-wide gap between protester and community center. Boyfriend and girlfriend sat on an outdoor love seat together, arms around each other, bathed in fire’s warmth. Friends sat and talked, beers in hand. Kids in another yard played with their dog.

With the path I’d taken, I reached the backyard first. The driveway was wider than it was long, crushed gravel, with room for multiple vehicles, and a fence stretched from the house at one corner to the garage at the other. My mom had invited neighbors, so it was a thing, even if things had reached a more relaxed point.

My dad sat on one of the lawn chairs, fire pit in front of him with the fire having burned down to just glowing coals. The barbecue was to his right, lid open, tiny bits of meat clinging to the grill.