Call If You Need Me by Raymond Carver Page A

hand. I told people I’d cut my head on the car door.”
    “How much longer did you keep drinking?” Carol said.
    “Quite a while. A year or so. Until I got picked up that night.”
    “He was sober when I met him,” Joanne said, and blushed, as if she’d said something she shouldn’t.
    Nick put his hand on Joanne’s neck and rested his fingers there. He picked up some of the hair that lay across her neck and rubbed it between his fingers. Some more people went by the window on the sidewalk. Most of the people were in shirtsleeves and blouses. A man was carrying a little girl on his shoulders.
    “I quit drinking about a year before I met Joanne,” Nick said, as if telling them something they needed to know.
    “Tell them about your brother, honey,” Joanne said.
    Nick didn’t say anything at first. He stopped rubbing Joanne’s neck and took his hand away.
    “What happened?” Robert said, leaning forward.
    Nick shook his head.
    “What?” Carol said. “Nick? It’s okay—if you want to tell us, that is.”
    “How’d we get onto this stuff, anyway?” Nick said.
    “You brought it up,” Joanne said.
    “Well, what happened, you see, was that I was trying to get sober, and I felt like I couldn’t do it at home, but I didn’t want to have to go anyplace, like to a clinic or a recovery place, you know, and my brother had this summer House he wasn’t using—this was in October—and I called him and asked him if I could go there and stay for a week or two and try to get myself together again. At first he said yes. I began to pack a suitcase and I was thinking I was glad I had family, glad I had a brother and that he was going to help me. But pretty soon the phone rang, and it was my brother, and he said—he said he’d talked it over with his wife, and he was sorry—he didn’t know how to tell me this, he said—but his wife was afraid I might burn the place down. I might, he said, drop off with a cigarette burning in my fingers, or else leave a burner turned on. Anyway, they were afraid I would catch the house on fire, and he was sorry but he couldn’t let me stay. So I said okay, and I unpacked my suitcase.”
    “Wow,” Carol said. “Your own brother did that. He forsook you,” she said. “Your own brother.”
    “I don’t know what I’d have done, if I’d been in his shoes,” Nick said.
    “Sure you do,” Joanne said.
    “Well, I guess I do,” Nick said. “Sure. I’d have let him stay there. What the hell, a house. What’s that? You can get insurance on a house.”
    “That’s pretty amazing, all right,” Robert said. “So how do you and your brother get along these days?”
    “We don’t, I’m sorry to say. He asked me to lend him some money a while back, and I did, and he repaid me when he said he would. But we haven’t seen each other in about five years. It’s been longer than that since I’ve seen his wife.”
    “Where are all these
people
coming from?” Joanne said. She got up from the table and went over to the window and moved the curtain.
    “The kids said something about a fire,” Nick said.
    “That’s silly. There can’t be a fire,” Joanne said. “Can there?” “Something’s going on,” Robert said.
    Nick went to the front door and opened it. A car slowed and then pulled up alongside the curb in front of the house and parked. Another car drove up and parked across the street. Small groups of people moved past down the sidewalk. Nick went out into the yard, and the others—Joanne, Carol, and Robert—followed him. Nick looked up the street and saw the smoke, a crowd of people, and two fire engines and a police car parked at the intersection. Men were training hoses on the shell of a house—the Carpenter house, Nick saw at a glance. Black smoke poured from the walls, and flames shot from the roof. “My God, there’s a fire all right,” he said. “The kids were right.”
    “Why didn’t we hear anything?” Joanne said. “Did you hear anything? I