Jennifer Johnson Is Sick of Being Single by Heather McElhatton Page B

anymore.”
    â€œUh-huh,” the lieutenant says. “Things?”
    â€œMementos.”
    All the firemen stop and listen.
    â€œWhat’s a memento?” the lieutenant asks, and the guy who handed him the plastic doohickey says, “It’s like a keepsake.”
    Someone else says, “What you put in a scrapbook. Jerry’swife does scrapbooking. Right, Jerry? Scrapbooking’s for mementos, right?”
    â€œAnd keepsakes,” Jerry shouts back.
    â€œIt was just stuff my boyfriend gave me. I mean, my ex-boyfriend.”
    â€œThe musician ?” my mother says and smacks her forehead. “Him again!”
    â€œArlene,” my dad warns.
    â€œI just wanted to burn it all,” I say. “Get rid of it. I thought the tub would be safest. I soaked everything in lighter fluid from the grill. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
    â€œI don’t understand,” my mother says forlornly to my father. “She was such a good baby. A champion ice skater! And she wrote that Mother’s Day poem that won the school award. What happened? What did I do wrong?”
    â€œIt’s okay,” Hailey says and sits down. “I would have burnt all that stuff, too. That guy was a jerk.”
    â€œWhy didn’t you just use your grill?” the plastic doohickey guy says. “You can burn anything on a grill.”
    â€œIf it’s far enough away from the house,” the lieutenant adds.
    â€œWell, yeah,” the doohickey guy says. “I’m just telling her she could use the grill to burn keepsakes if she wanted. Better than the tub.”
    â€œTell her to watch out for glue guns,” Jerry says, who’s now standing with the group coiling a length of yellow nylon rope. “My wife got that glue gun that got no safety switch. Nearly started the kitchen table on fire.”
    â€œWhen was this?” the lieutenant asks.
    Jerry shrugs. “Month ago maybe.”
    â€œWell, it would have been nice to know about that,” the lieutenant says. “That should have gone in the newsletter.”
    I put my hands over my face because the tears are coming andthere’s nothing I can do to stop them. I start to sob. My mother puts her arms around me and kisses me on the head because the crying game goes both ways.
    â€œAll right,” the lieutenant says, “I guess that’s all. We taped up that door downstairs, but you better have your landlord fix it before your neighbors get home.”
    â€œThank you, Officer,” my mother says as they load up on the truck. “I’m so sorry. We’re so sorry about this. She really is a good ice skater.”
    My family and I go look at my apartment so my mom can make sure there are no peepers, rapists, or ex-boyfriends lying in wait. We stare silently at my charred bathtub and the burned shreds of shower curtain dangling like smoking cobwebs from the curtain rod. My mother goes to the kitchen and reappears with a can of Comet and a green scrubbie sponge.
    â€œAll righty, then,” she says, “let’s get to work.”
    I sit in a shame stupor on my bed as they all clean the house. Hailey doesn’t even get mad when she discovers her old Barbie head on my bookshelf, the one she used to style when she was little until I dyed the hair blue with food coloring and gave it a Mohawk. I just keep saying how sorry I am and how they don’t have to help. When I do try to help my mother just tells me to lie down. “Everybody needs to just lie down sometimes,” she says.
    They work until the ashes and crisp bits of burned shower curtain are gone, and in the end, everything almost looks normal again, but it still smells like smoke. My mother wants me to come home and sleep at the house. “I’ll be all right,” I tell her and she finally concedes, shaking her head, weary from the world, trying to understand the complicated nature of things.
    â€œFirst the