Burn(15)

“And they can bomb us from there,” Jason said.

“Not necessarily,” Sarah said. “Space could be hopeful, couldn’t it? A place where maybe it doesn’t matter if you’re American or Russian.”

“Or dragon,” Jason added.

“You think they want to go into space?”

“Who knows what they want?” Miss Archer said, but her friendly smile also contained a pointed invitation to gossip aimed directly at Sarah.

“Does everyone know?” Sarah asked.

“Frome isn’t that big,” Miss Archer said.

“Unfortunately,” Jason said.

“Is it going to be a problem that our dragon is blue?”

“Is he actually Russian?” Miss Archer asked. “Does he speak to you? What’s his accent like?”

“He sounds like a dragon. They don’t really have countries, do they? Except the Wastes? Even if we call them Russian or Canadian. Besides, it seems like he’s been here long enough to just be American.”

“That argument didn’t work for my parents,” Jason said.

Sarah frowned. “Do you really think there could be trouble?”

“I always think there could be trouble,” Miss Archer said. “That way I’m never surprised.”

“That’s probably less of a comfort than you think,” Sarah said.

“But you know how people are,” Sarah said to her father over dinner. It was little more than simmering stew and cornmeal, but at least it was warm. “If they think he’s actually Russian—”

“Stop concerning yourself with that dragon,” her father said, not looking up from the Tacoma News Tribune and Herald, the same one she’d seen at school.

“I just don’t want people giving you trouble because we hired—”

“You don’t need to concern yourself with my trouble either. I will handle the claw.”

“They don’t like that,” she said. “When you call them that.” He glanced at her over the corner of his paper. “Well, they don’t. It’s not a nice word.”

“What do you think they call us?”

“He’s only said human or mammal.”

“And that doesn’t strike you as insulting?”

“I’m just saying—”

“They don’t need you to defend them.” His voice was harder now, stern. “They weigh seventy tons. They can fly and breathe fire. They are, in fact, dragons, Sarah. Soulless animals. They don’t have feelings to hurt any more than a wolf who would eat you for his breakfast.” He made an annoyed flick of the newspaper and went back to reading it. “Just because the devil gave them the gift of speech doesn’t mean you’re talking to anything more than a mostly undomesticated predator.”

“The devil?”

“It’s just a saying.”

“An old one. An ugly one.”

“Sarah—”

“People called Mom names, too. And you for marrying her.”

There was a silence behind the newspaper, a stillness that did nothing for Sarah’s anxiety. She didn’t know why she was poking so much. The oddity of her father hiring a creature he so clearly mistrusted was hard to square, especially from a man she knew to be difficult but not hateful. He’d nursed her mother without complaint through the tumor that had devoured her stomach less than two months after first diagnosis, bringing an end to a marriage that had been happy but had never, not once, been easy.

Washington wasn’t the South or their neighbor Idaho, where marriage between whites and blacks was still illegal. It wasn’t even Oregon, which hadn’t repealed its laws against interracial marriage until just six years ago. Washington had done it in 1868, the sixth of the forty-eight states to do so (so early, in fact, it hadn’t even been a state yet). This was a forward-looking place. But that hadn’t stopped the looks. The messages left in their mailbox that a younger Sarah occasionally found. Hadn’t stopped the surprising resistance Sarah herself had occasionally even faced at the beauty salon her mother had taken her to in Tacoma to “properly learn how to manage that hair of yours.” The roomful of laughing women, their skin matching the dark of Sarah’s mother, coming to an uncomfortable silence once Darlene and Sarah arrived. It picked up again, almost immediately, but that pause was there.

Come to think of it, maybe her father’s anger wasn’t so surprising after all. Maybe it was the natural outlet for a man who’d married for a love that cost him and then was taken— “If you think what people called me and your mother is anything like the same as what I call a dragon,” he said now, too quietly for comfort, “then I don’t know what to say to you, daughter.”

He went to bed shortly thereafter, directing not another word at her, as if he really didn’t know what to say. She lay awake long after she knew him to be asleep. She was troubled, to be sure, but that wasn’t why she’d resisted sleeping.

Tonight was the night Jason closed up the diner for Al, and for half an hour or forty-five minutes, the diner was the one place on earth where she and Jason could ever be properly alone.

Deputy Emmett Kelby was a stupid man. He knew it, which was bad enough, but he knew everyone else knew it, too. He’d never make it past deputy, that much was clear. Even if Sheriff Lopez moved on—and don’t think that last name didn’t bother Kelby on a daily basis—and the entire rest of the Pierce County Sheriff Department were somehow razed to the ground, he’d somehow still be Deputy Kelby until the day he died.