Chapter 2: Warm Like Uncle Wick

At the curb Rennie stood with both hands on the strap of her backpack and watched the delivery boy ride off down the row of parked cars. He didn’t look back. When the corner took him and the trees closed over the road, she turned and went to her mother and pressed her face into her mother’s sleeve.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t make him say yes.”

“That wasn’t your job.” Her mother’s hand closed on her cheek and squeezed, the way she only did when she meant it. “You found him. I just had to walk out there and say the same words.”

“I said it worse.”

“He heard you, and that’s the part that counts.”

Rennie thought about that. It was true. Nobody had told her to look at the delivery boy. She had looked at him because he was standing there behind his boxes, and then the warm had come up in her, the way it came up when she sat close to Uncle Wick, and she had known. That was all of it.

“Come on,” her mother said. “Let’s go home.”

They walked to the end of the row, where the white car sat by itself, and Rennie put her hand flat on the door.

“Hi, Puff.”

Puff made two soft sounds, low down, like a person humming with their mouth shut, and the back door swung open by itself.

Rennie climbed up into the seat and did the buckle herself, first try. She sat back with her hands still, because that was how her mother liked it, and by now she liked it too.

Her mother got in the front. They pulled out, and for a block nobody said anything, and the big dark trees went by the window. Next week she would start school right there, in that same building she had just walked out of, and see those kids every single day.

“Wick,” her mother said. “You still think the boy’s worth it?”

Fire came up beside her, out of nothing, curled at the top like a candle, and hung in the air at the height of her face. Uncle Wick was her mother’s fire, the one that had come home with her from the other side, and he had never once stopped talking.

“Worth it,” Uncle Wick said. “His gift is as good as yours. I knew it in one look.”

“You saw him across a parking lot.”

“I don’t need more than one look.” The flame leaned toward the front seat. “Sixteen, seventeen, somewhere in there. He’s got years.”

“I liked him too,” Rennie said, sitting forward as far as the belt let her. “I felt warm. Like sitting next to you, Uncle Wick.”

The little flame went still. Uncle Wick could go all the way still, and that was worse than when he was loud.

“Me,” he said.

“Uh-huh.”

“A person.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Warm like this.” He got bigger and smaller, bigger and smaller, the way he did when he was deciding whether to be insulted. “I’ve been a fire a very long time. A hearth-fire. Do you know what that means? And you’re telling me a person is warm the same as me.”

Rennie thought about how to say it. She looked at her own hands. They were warm now, warm on the inside of her wrists, warm in the middle of her back where nobody could see, and the delivery boy had been warm like that, and Uncle Wick was warm everywhere, all the time, and she could not see why it was not the same thing.

“I don’t know why,” she said. “It just is.”

For three seconds Uncle Wick said nothing, which for him was forever. Then: “Fine. Here’s what I hear, though. The practitioners at the preschool all say the same thing about that family. Ordinary people. Nobody in that house has trained a single day. Getting him to say yes is going to take some doing.”

“I’ll work hard,” Rennie said.

Her mother’s eyes came up in the mirror and stayed there one second.

“Okay,” she said, in the voice she used when she meant something else. Then she reached back and patted Rennie’s knee twice and put her hand on the wheel again, and that was the end of that.

Rennie looked out the window.

She knew about the other world the way she knew about Nana Iris’s bad hip: from being around, all her life, while the grown-ups talked over her head. Her mother had gone across when she was young — not somewhere you drove to — before the store and before Rennie, and come home able to do things other people couldn’t. Her father was the spirit of the woods past the last houses, and out there everything did what he said, mostly even the weather. One uncle was a root in the mountain that made you better when you were sick, and a person, both at once, which he was tired of explaining. Another uncle was fire, and rode in the car, and argued about everything. Rennie meant to be one of them. She only had to get good.

Her mother’s kind of work had a name here. Practice, and the people who did it were practitioners, and her mother’s kind was alchemy — fire, pots, leaves, a long time of waiting, one thing turned into another on purpose.

There was a school for it on the far side, and her mother’s old master was still there, and the way to him was a gray square on her mother’s phone with a small green dot in it. When the dot lit, her mother typed, and it went across.

The old master had given her mother one thing to do over here. Start it again. Find somebody with the hands for it. Teach them what we do.

She had been looking all of Rennie’s life. Once a week at the preschool, and at Nana Iris’s, and at the park, and at the grocery store. Nobody had ever been right.

And lately there had been messages that didn’t come from the square. Rennie knew because her mother didn’t type back. She read them and turned the phone face down and said nothing about it, and once Rennie asked, and her mother said it wasn’t anything yet.

Tonight there would be typing. Rennie liked that part. On the nights her mother typed, she was cheerful in the morning.

She let it go. Then she remembered the other thing, the one she’d been saving up, about her and her sister.

“Mom.”

“Mm.”

“At school today we talked about where we came from. One of the kids said he came out of the dumpster behind the grocery store. Another one said her mom and dad ordered her. Off the internet.”

“Did they.”

“So where did Wren and me come from?”

Her mother laughed through her nose.

“You came out of a kiln,” she said.

Rennie turned that over.

A kiln. She had been ready for the dumpster and ready for the internet. Storks were allowed too. A kiln was new.

“Which kiln?” she said.

“Mm,” said her mother, which meant no.

“Which one?” said Rennie. “We have more than one.”

Her mother put her blinker on and checked the mirror and didn’t say.

Rennie thought about it. She wanted to know which one had made her. It seemed like the kind of thing a person should get to know.

The car turned in at the house and stopped, and the engine went quiet.

“Give him a year,” Uncle Wick said, from over the roof of the car. “Two, maybe, if he’s got what I think he’s got.”

“Then make sure he has it,” said her mother.

“I’m not finished with him,” said Uncle Wick, to her mother or to the trees, and drifted on ahead of them toward the house.

Rennie climbed out and stood on the walk with both hands on her straps. She still didn’t know which kiln.

She went up the walk after them, still working on it.
Rennie is the beat of this chapter I keep turning over. She can’t explain why the delivery boy felt warm the same way Uncle Wick is warm — she just says it out loud and stands there while a very old fire decides whether to be insulted. I love that she never argues her way to it. She knows, and says so, and holds still. When was the last time you knew something true and had no words for it?

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