Gertie is in the kitchen, telling the children why they can’t play with firecrackers on the Fourth of July, while I sit in my study, fondling a package of Black Cats.

The speech has become a rite of summer. It was scripted before they were born, during one of the conversations Gertie and I had at the breakfast table. She asked me what rules I would enforce in a home filled with children. Would I spank them? Would we co-sleep? Would I change their diapers? Would those be cloth diapers? Would they be allowed to play with fireworks? I had made the remark, half joking, that my mother never let me have fireworks, not the real kind, anyway. Only sparklers and snakes in the driveway.

“That’s a good idea,” she said at the time, smiling. “A compromise.”

And here I sit, crinkling the opaque red paper with my fingertips, feeling the humps of the fireworks like torpedoes underneath, debating whether this is the year I slip a package of them to David with a wink and a nudge. But I hear Gertie talking and I know I won’t. I toss the package into the top right drawer where it’s been for the last three years and shut it. I lean back in my chair and listen.

“I just can’t imagine,” my wife tells the children, her voice trembling melodramatically, “if one of those things went off in your hand. You might never have the opportunities I have had.” She was probably looking at her fingers. Gertie is a concert pianist. Her fingers are important to her.

“You could never play piano. You could never pursue art or science. You could never live your life.” She’s animated now. “Not the life you want to live.”

Frightened by the dangers of firecrackers for another year, the children obediently disavow them. As a reward, Gertie tells them they may each have a sparkler. Perhaps even a snake or two.

I rise from my chair and shut the door, the thud making a louder sound than I intended.

---------

Though my children are young--David is nine, and Jessica is six--I am fifty-eight. I married Gertrude Reginald, twenty years my junior, a decade ago. She kept her last name because it’s the name she performs with. She allows me to call her “Gertie,” but only at home, and tolerates the occasional mail addressed to “Richard and Gertrude Ames.” My elderly parents still address letters that way, no matter how many times I remind them of Gertie’s last name. I don’t think it’s because they have forgotten.

A newspaper editor by trade, I met Gertie when I was teaching an evening media seminar at the University of Wyoming. I did it to stave off loneliness after my first wife’s death. She died of an aneurism when my eldest son, Ethan, was David’s age. Ethan’s a reporter now, in California, and we speak little, only when he has a question about mills in a city budget story. Anymore, it feels like my new life with Gertie and my two young kids is the only one I’ve ever known.

Gertie grew up in a similar environment. When her mother was a graduate student, she married a retired professor of music. A year later, they had Gertie. As the daughter of academics, and a prodigy of sorts, she became a master pianist. Gertie spent her early twenties performing in concert halls on the East Coast before returning to Wyoming to care for her ailing father, her mother long since dead of breast cancer. I was sad when her father died last year. I’d felt a kinship with him.

Though her return to Wyoming was reluctant, the local arts community embraced Gertie, providing her with endless venues. That’s how I met her. I wrote a profile of Gertie before her debut performance. We were two people in desperate situations, and we immediately hit it off, marrying just months after publishing the story. This irked some subscribers so much that they canceled their subscriptions. They questioned my ability to lead the newspaper objectively with such compromised principles. One caller wondered how many other sources I’d slept with for information. It was just a profile, I told him.

Between the loss of my first wife and the stress at the paper, I’ve put on a few pounds. At my age, this has led to some health problems. I have been diagnosed with arterial hypertension, which is just a fancy medical way of saying I have high blood pressure. Lately, it’s led to all kinds of other problems, the most irritating of which is sleep apnea. I wail and wheeze so much at night that Gertie has moved to our guest room to sleep. Gertie needs to be well rested so she can perform to her expectations at church or at a university recital. She tells me this is the only reason she’s sleeping in another bedroom, but I don’t believe her. My parents occupy separate bedrooms, and the thought of sleeping apart has always frightened me. My first wife and I never slept separately. To be doing it now, I think, raises my blood pressure more than anything.

Because I get so tired, with the weight and the high blood pressure and the poor sleeping and the stress at the paper, I’ve arranged to work from home a few hours in the morning. I trade e-mails with my city editor, my number two. He keeps me up-to-date on the activities of our small staff of reporters, sending me their enterprise pieces, expecting only a light edit. As my number two, he likes it when I’m gone. It means he’s number one, and he is good at taking charge. He wants to run the paper when I’m gone. I hoped Ethan might edit the paper some day, just like I have, just like my dad did. But I can’t say it’s in the cards. I’m okay with that.

I rock back in my chair, and the squeaking of the hinges is like a violin lulling me to sleep. I don’t want to work today, I don’t want to write my Saturday column to the readers, I don’t want to work with more cub reporters, telling them not to begin a lede with “the” because it sounds like “duh.” I just want to rest. But my sleep apnea will alert Gertie that I’m napping, and she’ll come in to criticize my lack of productivity. Gertie thinks I barely function as an editor anymore. She’s convinced I’m going to get fired, losing us our health insurance. Maybe she’s right, but I don’t know. Just five minutes.

---------

I’m almost asleep when I hear a rustling at the door. I sit up quickly, but I’m not worried it’s Gertie, because I know it’s David.

“Come in, son,” I say. He approaches, laughing. David is still at an age when his dad can impress him, and that doesn’t last forever, so I take advantage of it while I can. While he still lives in the house, while he still talks to me. “What are you doing?”

“Nothing.” He sounds disappointed.

“Your mother said no to fireworks this year?”

“Yeah. It’s not fair. Jake and Everett get to play with ’em.”

“Them. It’s them.”

“They get to play with them. What’s the big deal?”

“You can get hurt, that’s the big deal,” I reason, but I’m just echoing Gertie. You can get hurt riding a bike or playing soccer. If we don’t let David play with fireworks under our supervision, I’ve told her, he’ll just do it with a friend and get into real trouble—maybe even hurt himself. But Gertie reminds me that I’m on record agreeing with her. She is like a lawyer sometimes.

“Sparklers are for sissies,” David says.

“Watch your mouth,” I warn. Gertie doesn’t like that kind of language. She thinks it’s sexist and, more importantly, unsophisticated. I think it’s a derogatory term for gays, so it’s a rule I don’t mind.

“Sorry, dad. But Jessica likes sparklers. I mean I’m nine years old. Sparklers?”

I heave a sigh that lets David know I commiserate.

“I’m sorry, David, but if your mother says you can have sparklers this year, then you should consider yourself lucky.”

“Did Ethan get to have fireworks when he was a kid?”

David already knows the answer. This is, to my estimation, why David fights for fireworks every summer. He defers to Ethan’s upbringing often: when he wants to walk to school by himself or ride his bike without a helmet or wear sneakers to church.

“Yes, David, Ethan was allowed to play with fireworks. But we have different rules now, and those are the only rules you need to worry about.” I’m not good at being stern anymore. David can tell I’m just going through the motions. But I’m fifty-eight. I’m too old to be doing this all over again. How else am I supposed to be?

“Did you play with fireworks as a kid?” he asks innocently, and his new tactic surprises me. It’s like he’s tapped out the well of his half-brother’s experiences and has had to reach deeper into his bag of tricks. I’m already calculating whether he’ll use it against me with Gertie if I tell him.

“I never did, no,” I lie. “I wasn’t allowed to. But I know what can happen if you play with them.”

I’m not sure I lied to Ethan about anything. Did Ethan suffer bumps and bruises from such an upbringing? He did. But he’s doing all right. His mother believed in an open, honest approach. She also breastfed, which my parents thought was provincial. Poor people breastfed their children. Rich people bought formula. She was pretty radical, to be truthful, my first wife. The way we are raising David and Jessica is more like the way my folks raised me, which is why, I suppose, I go along with it.

“One time I was playing with some friends,” I tell David, “and they had Roman Candles. Do you know what those are?”

David nods his head.

“They’re very dangerous,” I say to protect myself in case Gertie is listening. Even a story about fireworks might be contraband in our house, I don’t know. Sometimes I feel the rules are made up as we go. “I knew I wanted nothing to do with them.”

This was, of course, another lie. I wanted everything to do with them. I didn’t participate because I knew I wasn’t allowed. I chickened out. I was scared.

“These boys were fighting with those Roman Candles, pointing them at each other, hitting each other with the stars shooting out of them. I knew it was trouble, so I stayed away.”

“You stayed on the sidelines,” David points out, happily. It is one of the sports analogies Gertie uses with David to help him understand why he should not participate in food fights or encourage the class clown. Gertie detests sports. She believes they take away money from more important pursuits, like the arts. But she makes a concession in certain cases if she thinks it will help the children understand a lesson.

“I stayed on the sidelines, David, exactly. And thank goodness I did.” I say it with all the conviction of flushing a toilet. “Because one of those boys got shot in the eye, and he nearly lost it.” This is a fabrication. The truth is one of the boys was skimmed on the forehead by a shot and suffered a minor abrasion. I don’t even think it bled. They continued with the game until the last of the Roman Candles had burned out and then we went home.

But David looks sufficiently frightened, which is the preferred outcome in our house. He also looks a little sad. I think for a minute he might even lose interest in sparklers--wouldn’t that please Gertie, wouldn’t that displease me--but then he puts his fingers on the handle of the top drawer and I tense. When he withdraws his hand, I worry that I am wearing too obvious an expression of relief, so I change it to indifference. If only I could, I would open that drawer, walk him out to the driveway, toss that lit string of Black Cats onto the street, and watch each firecracker pop and snap like a machine gun. But we’re not allowed.

“What’s your favorite firecracker?” he asks. It appears David was actually encouraged by my story, and I already regret not ratcheting up the outcome. But what does it matter?

“Cherry bombs,” I say. “They look like little cherries, and the fuse looks like the stem. They pack such a punch”—I slap my fist in my palm—“that you can’t even get them anymore. They’re illegal.”

His face lights up.

“Do you have any?” he asks excitedly, but now I know I’ve gone too far. We don’t keep guns in the house, but if we did, this feels like the point where David would have found one. I’m nervous about the whole thing. I’m nervous Gertie will hear us talking. I’m nervous David will blurt something about cherry bombs at dinner and I’ll have to sit through one of her recitals getting the cold shoulder from the stage.

Along with the Black Cats, I keep a cherry bomb in the drawer. It’s leftover from when I was a teenager. I doubt it would light. The powder must be ruined by humidity and age. I’ve kept it for all of these years, I don’t know why. I keep it hidden in a porcelain dish, along with old keys, Indian pennies, guitar picks and my first wedding ring.

I bought the cherry bomb with my friend, Peter, at a fireworks shack on the state line. I also bought a Catherine Wheel and sparklers. Peter bought some M-80s and a lunch sack full of bottle rockets. We’d driven his dad’s Chevy there without permission. We were taking girls to Vedauwoo, and we wanted to impress them.

The girls loved the sparklers, dancing around the boulders under the moonlight while they spelled their names and ours, drawing hearts and stars around them. Peter and I polished off a beer we’d stolen from his dad’s fridge, and he used the empty can to shoot bottle rockets into the nearby reservoir. I lit the Catherine Wheel. It spun across a boulder down to another one below, fizzling into a charred mound. When the girls’ sparklers ran out, they huddled on a boulder and whispered into each other’s ears, so Peter lit an M-80 and tossed it down into some trees. When it went off, the blast was so loud that it sounded like a hunter landed an elk a foot from our ears. We scurried behind a thicket, worried a ranger would catch us. In the darkness of the tall trees, I clutched the cherry bomb in my pocket and contemplated tossing it as far as I could into the reservoir. But I heard twigs snap and leaves rustle underfoot. One of the girls threw her arms around my waist. I dropped the firecracker in my pocket and clutched her back.

---------

Gertie is driving me to the doctor now. We’re going to learn whether the new medication I’m taking, some overpriced pill they advertise on TV, is working. We’ve left the children with a babysitter so we can tend to my health without worrying them.

“We’ll go straight to the concert hall after your appointment,” Gertie reminds me. This was the original reason we had arranged for a babysitter. The kids don’t often attend Gertie’s recitals. It’s hard for them to sit still.

“I know. We discussed it,” I say. I remove my glasses and wipe my face several times, trying to erase my constantly exhausted expression. Gertie looks my way and I catch her out of the corner of my eye. She says nothing.

“I’m still coming,” I assure her. I replace my glasses and look over the top of the rims. “What will you perform?”

I try to appear interested. There was a time when I really was interested. I thought it was very sexy for an old, widowed editor to be dating a young, talented concert pianist. But then the concert pianist wanted children and we stopped going to Denver for weekend romps. Besides, and this might make me seem uncultured, I can’t keep straight the differences between the sonatas and concertos and all the rest. You want to talk to me about city budgets, then we might have something to talk about. Sports scores, too. When my father was editor of the paper, I used to cover prep baseball and football. Nobody wanted these beats, but I didn’t mind. I liked paying my dues. I earned my way to the big chair.

“Mozart’s Piano Concerto in D Minor. Do you remember it?” she asks. I shake my head. She’s always asking if I remember pieces. I suppose they’ve all played on the stereo during dinner, but I’m too busy eating my roasted yams to notice. Too busy trying to cut the stubborn strands of steamed asparagus, wondering how it is I have high blood pressure and a bad heart when I’m eating stringy green vegetables. I am reminded that as a kid I never ate vegetables. I ate peanut butter.

“I performed it the night we were engaged,” she says. I concede that I have forgotten, and apologize. I tell her what a nice night that was. How nicely she played that night.

“Thank you,” she says semi-sweetly. “The music department asked me to perform Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture, but really, don’t you think it’s overdone? It’s so tacky to perform it every holiday. Tchaikovsky didn’t even care for the piece when he wrote it, Richard. It was a commission, that’s all.”

We turn right at the mall and go around back toward a large parking lot where the doctor’s office is located. I always thought it was strange to have a doctor’s office in a mall parking lot. Gertie turns off the engine and we get out of the car. We walk up the curving sidewalk into the brown brick building and check in. We sit in the waiting area for twenty minutes and read year-old copies of Better Homes & Gardens. At one point, Gertie reaches over and squeezes the top of my hand. I grimace. She knows I am nervous.

After the doctor has explained that my blood pressure is still too high, he prescribes more name-brand medications to enhance the arsenal in the medicine cabinet in our downstairs bathroom. Then he says he wants to see me in two weeks. I thank him for his time and he leaves. As I button my shirt, I look over at Gertie in the corner chair, holding her handbag tightly in her grip. Her lips are pursed, and I can’t tell if she’s worried or annoyed. She must suspect I’ve been sneaking junk food at the office. Her suspicions usually are not incorrect. I don’t mean to eat all the time. I just need coffee. The doctor has told me to avoid caffeine, but I’m already so tired, and I have a paper to run. So when I step out for coffee and my stomach growls and I know I’ve got more asparagus to eat at home, I tell myself, “Why not?”

“What?” I ask Gertie.

“It’s nothing.” She digs in her purse for her cell phone and checks for messages from the babysitter. Gertie worries when we leave the kids with someone, always calling to see what activities they’re engaged in, making sure they’ve snacked on the freshly sliced carrots in the fridge. I’ve been through this before with Ethan, so I don’t worry about the babysitter. But this is Gertie’s first time around, so I try not to be difficult.

“We’d better go to the pharmacy now,” she says, looking at her watch. “I have just enough time before warm-ups.”

“Thanks for fitting me in,” I say, and I know I shouldn’t have.

“I beg your pardon?”

“I misspoke,” I say. “I appreciate your taking the time.” But it’s too late, and she knows that I’ve employed sarcasm. We check out at the front desk and walk to the car silently. To break the silence, I offer to drive, but she’s uncomfortable letting me drive in my condition. I huff, but only for myself to hear.

As we make our way around the back of the mall to the main road, Gertie’s phone rings. She reaches to the floorboard and frantically digs through the purse near my feet, keeping one hand on the steering wheel. I crack a joke about being uncomfortable driving with someone who doesn’t keep both hands on the wheel, but either she doesn’t get it or isn’t in the mood. She tosses the purse on my lap and yanks out the phone. She looks at her caller ID.

“Hi,” Gertie says, “what is it?”

“You know, I’m uncomfortable driving with someone who is using a cell phone.” I’m teasing, but it sounds more mean-spirited than flirtatious. She ignores me.

“What?” she asks into the phone. Gertie shoots me a look of desperation.

“What?” I mouth the question. “What is it?” I ask quietly.

“Oh no. Oh my God, no,” she says.

“Gertie,” I say, grabbing her arm. “What is it?” I ask in a stern voice. She shakes her head.

“OK, OK, we’ll be right there. Tell him we love him.” She hangs up the phone. I’m really angry with her, but I know something’s wrong. I can feel my chest tighten. I take a deep breath and exhale. I don’t have the lung capacity I did when I was younger and more athletic.

Gertie stares at me deeply, and though it’s only for a second, she looks incensed. “David’s at the hospital. A firecracker blew up in his hand.” A tear rolls down her cheek and she steps on the gas, careful not to drive much faster than the limit.

I immediately worry that David found the cherry bomb in the porcelain dish. My neck tightens and I rub it with a weak hand. During the entire trip to the hospital, I can’t erase the vision of David’s severed fingers, the nubs nothing more than ground meat.

It’s rush hour, so it takes us an eternity to get across town. I feel Gertie’s anger boring into me as we creep at a snail’s pace toward the hospital. I’m not sure why she suspects me. I’ve recited her every talking point on fireworks, on every dangerous thing in the world, for that matter. But somehow, she knows, and it must be the expression on my face, because it is indeed my fault.

Gertie jerks the car into the hospital parking lot and lands in the first spot she can find near the emergency room entrance, slamming the front tires into the curb. She opens the door and gets out, leaving me behind to lock the door as she breaks for the entrance. Our old wagon doesn’t have automatic locks. I fumble for my keys, secure the doors and run inside.

Our babysitter, Annie, is holding Jessica’s hand while she consults with Gertie, who listens patiently, and, for the moment, unassumingly. Annie is in tears, near hysterics, actually, and so I put my hand on her shoulder.

“It’s OK, Annie,” I tell her, a little winded. “Kids get into things.”

Gertie shoots me a look, and it’s not because I’m comforting Annie but because I’m proving her thesis true, that I’ve somehow caused all of this.

“Mr. and Mrs. Ames?” a doctor approaching from the hallway calls to us. We rush over to him.

“David’s fine,” the doctor tells us, and my heart swells. “He’s just got some minor burns on one hand. Apparently he was lighting firecrackers”—I gulp—“and failed to release one before it discharged.”

“You said firecrackers?” I ask, still out of breath. “What firecrackers?” Gertie mumbles, but I pay her no mind.

“He said they were Black Cats,” the doctor says. “Dangerous, but there’s worse out there, believe me. We’ve cleaned the wound and a nurse is applying a bandage now. There’s no permanent damage.”

“Thank God,” Gertie says. She looks up and rubs her hands on her face. Her thin brown hair falls to her waist.

Relief washes over me, but the feeling quickly turns into a prickle, and then a shiver. My chest constricts, like I’ve been forced underwater, and my arm feels like it’s fallen asleep. I’m suddenly so lightheaded. And tired. I try to sit down for a minute. If I could just catch my breath. The doctor asks if I’m okay.

But I know it’s a heart attack. Sweat drips from my brow into my eyes and it stings. I close them. Gertie panics and hits me repeatedly on the arm. But I don’t panic. In the darkness behind my closed eyelids I see the pulsing of purple and yellow stars, the blood rushing out of my head and whirling around in my body, hitting a blockage somewhere, I think to myself, I’m sure. Out of the stars emerges a face. It’s my first wife, and like a ghost, she wafts by my mind’s eye. Chasing her is Ethan, a young Ethan, happy and energetic. He runs past me too, he’s running out to the back yard, and I hear a loud noise. A bang. It’s jarring. It’s pleasant. Like a screen door slamming shut. A gate swinging open.