We took the brass elevator up to Dad’s hotel room. I pressed my sweaty hands against the shiny walls. Edmund was usually patient with you but that day he was angry with your cavalier attitude toward time. You told him he was too serious. I tried to escape over a path of shimmering handprints. You said it didn’t always pay to be first. The early bird was overrated, you proclaimed. We knocked but there was no answer. The door wasn’t locked so we walked right in, Edmund first. He ran over and fell down on his knees. There were four envelopes resting on the bed. Too late, Edmund whispered, too late, his voice dry and cracking, full of ashes.

We were thirteen when Mum made that pumpkin cake at Halloween. Dad was upstairs in their bedroom, lying on the bed in the dark. You were in the house, in the living room reading, when Nate came by to see if I wanted to go for a walk. I finished doing my chores in the barn before I crept down over the ridge to join Nate. There was one cow left. He was the first boy to kiss me, back behind the orchard, down the path. Nate loved our little old farm right in the town. He lived in the parsonage by his father’s church on the small bluff by the cemetery. It overlooked the Minas Basin to the north and behind it were the Look-Off and Cape Blomidon. It was a school night and the sky was getting darker, a cool wind blowing from the north. There were only a few dry leaves left on the trees, their whispers high in the branches. Nate and I saw Mum illuminated in the window as she threw the cake across the room. The icing was bright orange.

We ran around to the front just as you came out the door and kicked the jack-o’-lantern off the top step. It flew across the lawn in pieces. The candle in the pumpkin set the brown grass on fire. Nate and I yelled for you to put it out. “Let it burn,” you screamed as you came running down the steps. Edmund came out the door and pushed you aside. “We have to put it out now or it will be too late to stop it,” he yelled at us. I stomped on the fiery carpet of grass in my rubber boots. I smelled burning rubber. Edmund stomping on the flames yelling, “Run to the brook.” The brook is tiny now, part of it choked off by the condo development, but it used to surge in the spring when the big rains came. I stood there in the water with my hot rubber boots steaming. Edmund and Nate dancing on the lawn, you still standing on the top step. There was a dash of moon.

Mum didn’t come out after you smashed the pumpkin. Supper burned. Edmund helped her clean up, threw out the food. She took us out to a restaurant. Dad just stayed in the bedroom. Nobody but Nate and Edmund talked. Nate’s an accountant now. He’s also in the volunteer fire department.