Free Firewood

They found the house on Traprock Road, a brick ranch with white awnings and a Beware of Dog sign in the bay window. The front door was propped open despite the cold. Billie could hear the TV playing the same sitcom her mother used to watch while she washed the dishes.

“Okay,” Billie said, clapping her hands. There was a high stack of firewood next to the steps, but no sign saying it was free.

“Maybe this isn’t it,” Anita said.

“Paula told us to look for a brick house.”

“There’s probably more than one brick house out here.”

“Wait a minute.” Billie knelt and picked up a wet piece of cardboard. “‘Free firewood.’”

“I can read,” Anita said.

They had forgotten their gloves. They each picked up an armload of wood and held it to their chests. Billie strained to hear beyond the laugh track on the TV.

“Janice,” a man said from inside. He coughed. “Janice!”

Billie waited for Janice to appear at the door and run down the steps, shouting at the girls to get off the property. She braced herself for the slur, or for a furious dog. She prepared to be struck by an object, something ceramic and pastel, something yanked in haste from a display cabinet. She pictured, for some reason, a strawberry-shaped cookie jar.

“Why are you just standing there?” Anita said.

“Do you think they even have a dog?”

“Don’t hear one.”

“So the sign is just to scare people.”

“Maybe they had a dog, and now they don’t.”

Billie followed Anita to the car and lowered the firewood into the trunk. They made two more trips, brushing bark and cobwebs and dirt from the fronts of their coats. Neither of them wore a hat, but Anita had tied a silk scarf around her throat that caught all the light when a man came to the front door and opened it wider.

“Hi,” Billie said, as brightly as she could.

Anita waved. The light from the house ran in and out of the folds of the silk. The man stood on his porch, arms crossed. His beard was gray, and he wore unlaced hiking boots.

“We saw your sign,” Billie said, leaning against the car.

The man touched his beard. They waited. He stood there. Then he turned and stepped away, leaving the door ajar.

“Put it back,” Anita whispered. “Let’s just put it back.”

“Now?”

“No. When he closes the door.”

“How do you know he’ll close the door?”

“Shh. He will.”

They got back into the car. Anita started it and turned the heat up as high as it would go.

“What do you think he’s doing now,” she said.

Billie clasped her hands together and turned them inside out. “No idea.”

“You know what, this is stupid. Let’s just take the wood and go.”

“Our boyfriends are stupid,” Billie said.

“Why? They didn’t do anything.”

They sat and looked at the house, Billie waiting for guidance. Over their years as roommates, she had developed a habit of deferring to Anita, who was, she believed, objectively smarter, and whose confidence was supported by a string of accomplishments.  Sometimes Billie joked that she’d started dating Tony only because Anita was dating his older brother, Nick. To trail after Anita was to wind up in good places: for instance, the interior of her car, with its heated leather seats and its newspaper tidily folded in the backseat. She drove with it in case she got stuck in a traffic jam.

This morning, their first as guests in the Martin family’s house in the Berkshires, Billie and Anita had been left alone, with a pot of slightly burned coffee and a TV that offered three channels. Nick and Tony had joined their mother, Paula, on a brief, reluctant trip to see their grandmother in a nursing home. Billie and Anita were not invited, and nobody had to say why. Paula’s note, pinned under the empty butter dish, asked them to pick up more butter, and to grab some free firewood from the brick house on Traprock Road. 

The car was getting too hot, the heat drying their mouths and making their eyes water. Anita tapped at her eyelids with her fingertips.  “Let’s just get out of here.”

“I thought you wanted to put the wood back.”

“I don’t know.” Anita’s voice scraped her throat on its way out. “What do you want to do?”

Billie wanted it to be well past midnight already. She wanted to press her cold toes against Tony’s warm leg in the third-floor bedroom. There were copper plates on the wall and a mother-of-pearl tray on the dresser, both of which glowed in the moonlight.

“I’m not sure,” she said.

“Why don’t you make a decision for once.” Anita checked the sides of her mouth for crumbs of dried lipstick. “How about that?”

“Fine.” Billie looked back at the house. “It’s not like the guy told us to leave.”

“It’s not like he spoke at all.”

“He wasn’t happy to see us,” Billie said, but she wasn’t sure that mattered. Her mother’s side of the family was full of men with eyes and beards like that. When she wasn’t standing in their driveway with an armload of their firewood, men like that didn’t scare her. Men like that had iced her sprained ankle in sixth grade and worn, for her benefit, thick wax vampire’s teeth on Halloween. Men like that had cried when she was born.

“Let’s just go,” she said.

“Now?”

“Yes. Drive. Now.”

Anita shifted into neutral instead of reverse, then into park, then into reverse.

“Wait,” Billie said. The man was on the porch, hands on hips, surveying his yard. “He came out again.”

The man backed into the house but left the door ajar, the way Billie would, years later, when she was expecting a friend to stop by. It looked like a kind of welcome, but Billie consulted the wet bark of the trees, the overcast sky, the odor of a distant fire. No. Not a welcome.

They were slower this time, picking up the wood and returning it to its original place. It felt heavy in Billie’s arms, and twice she almost slipped. She liked the idea of returning to Paula with a fractured bone. Look what I went through for you.

“They’re watching us,” Anita said.

Billie looked up at the house. She saw nothing, heard nothing.

“How do you know?”

Anita had the last of the firewood in her arms. She licked the corners of her mouth. “I just do,” she said. “I can tell.”

The car felt deeply silent without the logs jostling against one another in the trunk. Billie turned in her seat and watched the house through the back windshield: nobody stood at the door. The air was clear and cold and empty.

“We still need to get some firewood,” she said.

Anita drove them to the grocery store, where they took what appeared to be the last remaining parking spot. As they entered, they walked by a man painting a green wreath on one of the windows.

“No carts left,” he said from his perch on the ladder.

“Excuse me?” Anita said.

“Somebody just took the last cart.” He gestured at an empty stall. “You ladies will have to carry it all.”

Billie thanked him and followed Anita through the automatic doors. A bag of cranberries had broken open, and Anita walked right through them as Billie stepped over them carefully.

“I’ll go right, you go left,” Anita said. “Let’s just find it and get out of here.”

Billie turned left, stopping to look at the lobsters in their tanks, recalling that every time she’d gone shopping with her mother when she was young, they had taken a detour to “choose” a lobster—to choose was to point at your favorite through the glass—and she had loved that ritual, just as she had loved the woman behind the deli counter who greeted her mother by name and handed Billie a thin scrap of ham, which she held politely between her teeth, hating the texture, loving the flavor of the smoke.

It was almost certain that Anita would find the firewood first. Billie wandered, unhurried. She passed the dairy wall, shivering next to the milk, and her next thought was, Oh, Tony, I’m so sorry, because she was drawn to the man before her, whoever he was, reaching for something on the highest shelf in the baking aisle. She watched the slight shift of the bones in his hands. She recognized the shirt, the frayed strap of the wristwatch that she had recently stored, at his insistence, in an empty water glass, lest it fall off the nightstand and under the bed, as had already happened twice, because they both moved so much in their sleep. This was Tony. Tony. Lately she had been calling him Anthony, both for its sweet possessiveness—the name of his birth, not the name of his schoolyard—and also because she wanted more of him, any way she could get it. Whatever was more, she wanted. In their months together this feeling had not subsided. You’re too much, he’d told her, and, You need to relax. Relaxing, in her experience, got you nothing.

It felt like a game, that she had seen him, and he hadn’t seen her. She followed him.

He was empty-handed and heading for the exit. She wondered what he’d come in for, wondered if Paula had sent him. She wondered if Paula trusted her sons’ girlfriends to run only certain errands. A mountain of shrink-wrapped firewood stood by the floral arrangements—here, Tony paused, and Billie knew he was considering whether to buy her tiger lilies in orange paper—but he left with nothing, and when she took a package of wrapped firewood in her arms, it felt normal and right, the completion of the task she’d set out to do, and she was really thinking only, Anthony, Anthony, are you going to turn, are you going to see me, when Anita called her over, voice sharpened to a point, the turquoise silk on her neck fire-hot under the track lighting, and Billie turned and walked with what could only be described as obedience, joining her friend in line.

The wood didn’t fit in the store’s bags, so they each carried two shrink-wrapped armloads with red PAID stickers stuck to the sides.

“All done,” Billie said, tucking her firewood into the trunk next to Anita’s. “Happy?”

“Happy to waste fifty dollars? Not really.”

“I’ll split it with you.”

“Whatever,” Anita said. They got in and buckled. Anita cut in front of another car and sat through two cycles of traffic lights before she was able to pull out of the parking lot.

“Next year,” she said, “if you’re still with Tony, and I’m still with Nick, we do it properly.”

“I’m not going anywhere. I’ll be here.”

“Next year, we take the free firewood, and we bring it back.”

“Right.” Billie drummed her fingers on the window. “I saw Tony in the store. He didn’t see me, though.”

“I saw you both. He looked normal, you looked ridiculous.”

“How so?”

“I can’t imitate you while I’m driving,” Anita said. “Too dangerous.”

But she knew what Anita meant.

Once, when Billie and Tony met some of his friends in the city for a drink, he had placed a hand on her leg, and she felt a moment of panic: she did not want him to move, not even to lift his glass. She would rather throw his drink on the floor than let him move his hand. She tried to see her reflection in the mirror on the opposite wall and could not. She felt feverish and unreasonable.  She could feel it spreading under her ribs: the truth of her, her potential for unkindness, how her way of feeling desire left no room for dignity. Later, on the subway, she had to ask him if she had been acting strange at the bar. You were the same as always, he’d said, holding her elbow to steady her.

A quarter of a mile from the Martins’ house, Anita pulled over. Without speaking, she and Billie stood in the shelter of the open trunk door and tore the plastic off the firewood. There were four PAID stickers, and Anita rolled each of them into a tiny ball and shoved them in her back pocket.

“It should look dirtier, though,” Billie said.

They dropped the firewood onto the shoulder of the road. Billie kicked the ground to raise a spray of wet dirt and dead leaves, and when the wood was dirty but not too dirty, they put it all back in the car and drove to the house.

In the driveway, unloading the trunk once more, Billie took a deep breath. The air was rich with the neighbors’ woodsmoke. She tilted her head back and closed her eyes and wondered what it was like, what was it like, knowing you’d done absolutely nothing wrong, to believe you’d done nothing wrong.