Another City

By Mary Miller

My boyfriend’s sixteen-year-old daughter, Hailey, is in the habit of leaving the oven on. It seems to be a new thing, but I am also a new thing, and my boyfriend claims her new thing started with me. I made the mistake of admitting to a previous bout of fire starting, a period of time in which everything I touched was flammable and the people around me set fires, too. It was a spring and summer marked by letters from lawyers and fire trucks and firemen, my face in my hands. My boyfriend didn’t think it was funny, didn’t see the humor in it at all.
Hailey thinks I’m a snob and I think she’s sloppy. She leaves the milk out on the counter and her wet swimsuits on the floor, and she refuses to do laundry, so her clothes are always dirty and move about the apartment in great piles. She’s also pretty and athletic and breezily confident, and I resent her for it.
Today I come home to find flames licking the cast-iron skillet. It glows bright red, beautiful, the whole thing about to burst into a fireball, with Hailey nowhere to be found. I drop the groceries and turn the burner off, and then I stand there and assess the situation. I consider throwing flour on it—at the very least it will give her something to clean up—but the flames die out and the emergency is over. It seems impossible that the apartment hasn’t yet burned to the ground, taking the other units and the people inside them with us.
It is a miracle, truly. To be alive is a goddamn miracle.
If I’d arrived five minutes later, I’d have opened the door and closed it, called the fire department. Two or three minutes and I would have rescued my laptop and my little drawstring sack of jewelry. Most of my stuff is in storage—love letters from old boyfriends and childhood artwork, my wedding dress and wedding photos and all of the dishes my mother said I would need to set a nice table—but I would burn all of that myself.
I put the groceries away and forget about making lasagna, settle into bed with a book, and wait for Hailey to return. I am eager to tell her how I have saved her once again, to let her know how much she needs me, and by extension how much her father needs me, too.
When she arrives, it is two hours later and I’m still in bed.
She stands in the doorway in her bikini, her long hair dripping down her chest. Her skirt riding up in a way that isn’t attractive or sexy but simply ill-fitting, but she can get away with her sloppiness, which is what galls me most.
Her beach towel has surely been discarded by the door, and I can’t help but think that it is my towel on the floor. I purchased four of them, and she’s already left one at a friend’s house that we’ll never see again. They’re really nice towels. Still, they are only towels, and I shouldn’t buy things if I don’t want her to misplace or ruin them, if I am setting her up for a test she will fail.
“Hey,” she says. “Do you know where my dad is?”
“At work, I assume. I can text him.”
“It doesn’t matter, I don’t have anything to tell him.” Then she says she owes her friend Meghan twenty-five dollars for a school thing and needs the money today. I have cash—the exact right amount—so I give it to her.
“Thanks,” she says, and she turns to go, and I want to let her go, want to be the kind of person who can let her go, but I can’t, I’m not.
“When I got here, the skillet was on fire.”
“It was?”
“It was on fire,” I repeat. “It’s your Dad’s favorite skillet.”
“I’m sorry. I must’ve forgotten.”
“There wasn’t even anything in it. What did you forget?”
She gives me her sad face, the one she makes when her father yells her name and she comes slinking in from another room. Her father is always yelling her name, and I’ve told him to be gentler with her, to be kinder. That girls her age need all of the kindness they can get. I want to call her over to the bed and smell the chlorine on her skin, brush the tangles out of her hair. I’d be careful, so careful.
“You’re putting everyone at risk, everyone in this entire building—complete strangers, even. There’s no reason to kill strangers.”
She apologizes a third time and looks at her phone as she backs out of the room. I close my eyes, do my breathing exercise and repeat a mantra that goes I am the sky, everything else is just weather; I am the sky, everything else is just weather. It’s dumb, so I try a different one: I am strong and I am beautiful and I am enough. But then I’m thinking about the six months or so that I was flammable and how my life was no more terrible than it had ever been, other than the fires, of course, but there was nothing I could point to and say: Here. This. I should’ve told Hailey about it and tried to connect with her, but I don’t know what my role is in this situation. I’m the adult; she’s the child. I want to hang out with her in her room and listen to music, watch how fast she can text. Instead, I act like she’s a fuckup when I have to drive her to school in the morning because she’s missed the bus once again, even though I like driving her to school. I like pulling into the circular drive and asking if she has enough lunch money, telling her to have a good day. Sometimes she leaves a tube of lip gloss in my car, or a hairbrush, something that seems so heartbreakingly personal.
I don’t know how to be her friend or her parent or what something in between might look like. When I was her age, I spent hours every day reading Stephen King novels and staring at my face, and Hailey doesn’t do either of these things.
My boyfriend calls. He’s driving.
“Where are you?” I ask.
“The beach.”
It is the slower, but more scenic, route. I imagine myself with him: the windows open and the sun going down over the water. We don’t go out that often because he never has enough money and I don’t mind paying until I do, at which point I mind very much. He would rather stay in and cook, anyway. I buy most of the groceries, but people don’t think money works the same way with groceries.
“I’ll be home soon, I had to stay late with a student who got hit by a bus.” I wait for him to say more but he doesn’t. He is a great pauser. At the drive-thru, he’ll order one thing at a time and make the person say, “Is that all?” before stating the next item even if he knows the entire order. It can go on so long I nearly have a panic attack every time he pulls into Wendy’s.
“Well, is she okay?”
“She broke her wrist and cracked her pelvis,” he says, “but she’s fine. She’s a cute girl.”
“What does she look like?”
“What do you mean, what does she look like?”
“I mean why’d you tell me she’s a cute girl? How is that pertinent information?”
“She’s a good student,” he says. “That’s all I meant.”
“Are you attracted to her?”
“No, Caroline. I’m not attracted to nineteen-year-old girls.” And then he asks what I want for dinner. Do I need him to pick anything up? What do I want to watch on TV later? There are so many arbitrary questions that he would like me to answer, but I’m still thinking about the girl who cracked her pelvis and if he wants to fuck her.
“We’ll see,” I say, which is what my religious friend is always saying. There is nothing to do but wait and see.
After we hang up, I listen to Hailey laugh. She laughs and laughs—everything is so funny when she’s not with us. I know she’s talking to her girlfriend, a pretty blonde who lives in Missouri that she’s always FaceTiming. She met her last summer, and they’ve carried on a relationship via phone ever since. The blonde is scheduled to visit when school lets out and will stay with us for ten days, which seems like a very long time. I want to warn Hailey, prepare her for disappointment, tell her that father and I had the same high hopes only a short time ago.
It is too bad, I think, as I consider painting my toenails. It is all too bad. And then I go to the bathroom and strip the old polish off, run my toes under the water and pat them dry before putting on a fresh coat, just as my mother instructed. I use the blow dryer for a few minutes before applying a second coat and wonder if we’ll be in our bedrooms when the next fire overtakes the kitchen, moving into the living room to eat up the couch and curtains, trapping us while we paint our nails and talk on the phone. Perhaps I’ll be gone by then. I think about the people living above us and below us and next to us and how we are responsible for their lives, what a bad idea it is. I’ve only been living here a few months, but most of these people will always live in this shitty apartment complex across from the dollar store, just far enough away from the nice part of town that it might as well be another city.
“Hey,” my boyfriend says. “Where’s Hailey?” He leans down to kiss the top of my head. It’s my head he kisses now, or my cheek.
“In her room.”
“She’s not in there.”
“I don’t know then.”
“When’d you see her?”
“Like twenty minutes ago?” I say, wondering why he’s so concerned with her whereabouts. She comes and goes, comes and goes. My boyfriend doesn’t like her much because she reminds him of his ex-wife. His ex-wife: in and out of jail for driving under the influence and petty theft, current whereabouts unknown. They had shoplifted together, back when they were young, would come home and spread their loot out on the bed. But then my boyfriend stopped while she upped her game, or this is his story. It is always his story—which is so easy to ignore in the beginning, when you’re falling in love.
I like to hear about his ex and their two-person shoplifting ring, which seems reckless and fun and like something I would like to do with him as a bonding exercise, though I know I would be caught and taken to some windowless room with a mall cop who would tell me how I’ve ruined my life, fucked it up good this time, while we wait for the real cops to arrive.
We make ourselves stiff drinks and go out to the balcony like we do every evening.
He lights a cigarette and says, “Her girlfriend can’t come.”
“Why? What happened?”
“Her mother called and said she’s uncomfortable sending her daughter so far away to be with strangers for so long.”
“Well, yeah, it’s a long time. Why’d she agree to it in the first place?”
“I don’t know.”
“You have to talk to her again, convince her.”
“I’ll try, but I don’t think it’s going to do any good,” he says, and then the old man who lives in the apartment below us hollers up.
“Do you know where Hailey is?” my boyfriend calls down to him.
“She went for a jog.”
My boyfriend says he’s going down for a minute and do I want to come? I don’t. The two of them drink whiskey together, and lately he returns to the apartment so messed up he can hardly speak. One time this happened within ten minutes, like maybe not even ten minutes, and I wonder if it will happen again tonight.
When I hear them talking, I go back inside and consider the skillet—there is probably something that can be done to save it. I take a beer out of the refrigerator and twist off the cap, toss it onto the counter so I can hear it clink.
The door swings open and Hailey comes in, already pulling off her tank top and yanking her hair out of a ponytail. I want to tell her how beautiful she is. Instead, I hand her a glass of water.
“Are you hungry?” I ask. “I could order a pizza or Thai food?”
“I’m okay,” she says. And then, “maybe you could make me a grilled cheese later?”
“Sure, though your dad’s the best at grilled cheese.”
“He uses mayonnaise,” she says. “It’s so gross.”
I hear her say “thank you” as she closes her door, and then she’s getting into bed to FaceTime her girlfriend because they don’t yet know that their lives aren’t what they think they’ll be, that they won’t work out as planned. I walk quietly to her door, trying to make out the words of people in love, wanting to hear the words.

Mary Miller is the author of two novels, Biloxi and The Last Days of California, as well as two story collections, Always Happy Hour and Big World. Her work has appeared in The Paris Review, Pushcart Prize XLIV: Best of Small Presses 2020 Edition, The Best of McSweeney’s Quarterly, American Short Fiction, and others. She is a former Grisham writer-in-residence at the University of Mississippi (2014-15) and Michener Fellow at the University of Texas.

Illustration: Josh Burwell is an artist and illustrator from Mississippi currently living and working in Los Angeles, California. You can find more of his work at jburwell.com or on Instagram @jburwell.

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