This was my strategy: as soon as the papers catch fire, I hop off the porch and run down the block. When I’m at a safe distance, I stop to catch my breath and begin strolling back toward the Butterfields, hoping to time my arrival with their emergence from the house. I’m not sure what I planned to do then. Either jump right in and help put out the little fire, or stand transfixed, as if surprised to see them, and hope that Jade or Ann would see me, wave, invite me in. The point was not to allow them to go another day without seeing me.
I don’t recall debating this plan of action. Nerved-out and lovesick, I simply proposed it and then a short time later was lighting a match. I waited for a moment (my legs shaking from their desire to vault off the porch and run like hell) to make certain the fire had really taken hold. The flame lifted the corners of that stack of papers page by page, increasing the depth of its penetration but not the breadth. I could have put it out by stepping on it a couple of times and I came close to doing so, not out of foresight but panic. I remember thinking: This will never work.
The flame, after burrowing through a few layers, at last made its move to the heart of the pile—it seemed to have found the perfect dry bridge to race across. It was still not an impressive fire, by any means. It would not have done for cooking a trout and, at the point I fled and left it to its own nitrous fate, you would have been hard-pressed to toast a marshmallow over such a feeble flame.