Carter accepted philosophically that human life was sacred. He also accepted that in this country all men—women, too, in more enlightened times—were “created equal,” even if, as a well-educated and temperamentally more competitive man than his father ever recognized, he had always found the assertion optimistic. All right, he knew what the Declaration of Independence meant really, not that everyone was good at math but that they all had the same rights. Ergo, even Luella Watts Mandible enjoyed the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—the most vital being that first item, since he and Jayne were most certainly denying her liberty, and were she ever to pursue happiness she would forget she was pursuing happiness within sixty seconds and come back instead with a parsnip. Carter could marginally credit the possibility that somewhere deep inside that tangle of rhyming paranoia in his stepmother’s head remained some tiny glimmer, some infinitesimal remnant—under the size of a pea, even smaller than one kernel of popcorn—of the graceful, stunning, well-spoken, black-only-in-the-sense-of-exotic but comfortably-white-in-all-but-name seductress who had stolen his father’s heart in 1992—though Carter couldn’t locate an iota of the femme fatale himself. Theoretically, too, what was at issue in the compassionate, respectful day-to-day caretaking of a woman who through no fault of her own had COMPLETELY LOST HER MOTHERFUCKING MIND and was nothing but a PISSING, SHITTING, SHRIEKING SHELL wasn’t only the physical comfort, sense of self-worth, and feeling of psychic safety of their ward, but perhaps more importantly their own humanity, because obviously the very measure of a society is how it treats its most vulnerable citizens, so that to save his very soul and to represent the very best in what it meant to be a real American he was clearly obliged to ruin EVERY DAY and EVERY NIGHT of his WHOLE REMAINING MOTHERFUCKING LIFE.
So. Perhaps his calm, considered, rational, progressive forbearance had its limits. Belonging to the first generation of American men who pulled their domestic weight, Carter had already changed the X-thousand diapers he’d planned to, and at least his infant children hadn’t bitten him in the process. Yet God forbid his father would lend a hand. Douglas had embraced such a perfect passivity that you’d never know he had any causal link to the presence of this creature in their house.
Deploying the difficult situation to fortify the all-for-one-and-one-for-all of their marriage, Carter and Jayne convened in the kitchen, just the two of them, before bed, in the precious interval before Luella’s “night terrors” set in and she began to wail. Together they’d each sip a tiny glass of port. An emblem of better days, the measured extravagance helped to preserve their sanity. (A few luxuries had been facilitated by the sale of the BeEtle—a mere encumbrance now that they never went anywhere, and a liability given that the police may have abandoned investigating burglaries, muggings, and homicides, but were more rigorous than ever about issuing revenue-raising tickets for alternate-side parking violations.) The couple always lit a candle and turned off the overhead to create a semblance of romantic ambience. Ritually, exhaustedly, they would share the indignities of the day.
All the same, Jayne blamed him—their visitors-for-life were his family—and knowing she shouldn’t blame him merely buried the resentment into the deeper, more instinctual emotional stratum where the feeling was at its most virulent. Likewise, Carter couldn’t help but fume when Jayne threw up her hands, reminded him of how strenuously her doctors had advised against “stress,” withdrew to her Quiet Room, and locked the door—deaf to his proclamation that they had now entered a hard-assed era of American culture during which all that gutless guff about ADHD, gluten intolerance, and emotional support animals was out the window.
Yet the prime target of his enmity wasn’t his wife, but Luella herself. Carter had never much cared for the woman when in possession of her faculties. That floating, willowy deportment she’d cultivated, the hyper-civilized manners, the too-precise elocution—he’d never bought it. Luella’s whole shtick had been an artificial construct, and now, he believed, the surface refinement had been stripped off to reveal the real thing. Deep down, she’d always been a catty, cunning, covetous animal—ferociously determined to get her way; suspicious of others, since calculating, self-centered schemers always assume that everyone else is just like them; shrewd, but not very smart. It didn’t surprise him in the slightest that when you set her mind loose it produced rhyming drivel.
He found it telling, too, that the only food she’d eat without its being shoved forcibly down her gullet was anything chockful of sugar. In Luella’s heyday, she’d claimed to have no taste for sweets, a pretense that serviced her fashion-model figure. Add a few protein plaques and a smattering of miniature strokes to that mean scrabble of predatory opportunism in her head, and behold: a sweet tooth the size of a mastodon’s.
Luella had never liked Carter, either. She didn’t find him impressive. He’d overheard her once despairing to Douglas that his only son hadn’t inherited more of her husband’s esprit and joi de vivre. But the real reason she was uncomfortable around her stepson was that Carter had her number. She was a fake, she was a social climber, she had plotted from the start to marry Douglas only to outlive him and inherit his fortune, and when it eventually got out that Luella had left for la-la land in her latter fifties, Carter thought that was the best news he’d heard all day. Except now the revenge had boomeranged. She seemed to have deposited herself on his doorstep on purpose, like, There. You wanted the real Luella? Well, this is the real Luella. Happy now?
It didn’t help, either, that Luella was now a drooling kewpie-doll substitute for his real mother, whose disappearance into Manhattan’s anonymous mire of unremarked murders and missing persons had deprived him of any formal mourning of her passing. Only three years ago, the demise of the formidable powerhouse of charity fundraising would have occasioned one of the best-attended memorials of the year. If at last genuinely necessary, most charities had folded in the interim, and the sort of celebrity gala he imagined was unheard of. No one with a sou would flout it.
Carter saw no point in disguising it from himself: he wished Luella dead. While he might not have throttled her with his bare hands, in his personal Twilight Zone he’d gladly have thought-crimed the hellion cleanly to the cornfield. Because for all the hype about how dementia sufferers were “still capable of joy” and “still had value as human beings,” he detected no joy in their charge; the household hardly sponsored the buoyant sing-alongs and imaginative crafts projects of the apocryphally stimulating nursing home. And lifetime liberal or no, he was inexorably rounding on the view that to have “value” as a human being you needed to be of some earthly use to someone else.
At least Carter didn’t wish his father dead, too. Their relationship decontaminated of ulterior motives, Carter continued to feel a bedrock fondness for his father that he’d never trusted when it paid too handsomely. Late-life penury had likewise confirmed that his father’s character transcended the two-onion martini. Oh, he railed along with the best of his class, but at length Douglas had accommodated lifestyle demotion with surprising aplomb. So long as they kept him in liquid nicotine, he rarely complained. (In these ravenous times, the newer flavors of e-bacco stuck to the ribs: turkey-and-gravy-with-stuffing, or caramelized-ham-and-red-onion-chutney.) It was only the repetition that had grown unbearable; if Carter heard the three criteria of a functional currency one more time he would scream. Otherwise, Douglas had quietly adjusted to reading digital books and watched loads of TV.
Which was just how he was occupying himself in his room on the third floor the afternoon of March 7, 2032. Douglas was obsessed with the approaching presidential election, and that month would see primaries in Texas and Florida, among others—heavily Lat states that could help the incumbent. Naturally the Republicans were a write-off; the leading GOP contender had branded Dante Alvarado “Herberto Hoovero,” an epithet widely decried as racist. Yet the president was battling a serious challenge for the nomination from the leftwing grandee Jon Stewart, who was campaigning to wave the white flag on the bancor. Since the smallest little child could see that boycotting an increasingly entrenched international currency had proved a calamity for the US, the primaries—which, without a viable opposition party, were the election—pitted it’s-the-economy-stupid against the consolidation of ethnic equality. None of the Lats and white progressives who’d elected Alvarado wanted to see America’s first Mexican-born president serve only one term. Carter himself was torn, though he wasn’t telling Jayne that.
Not that Carter was allowed to divert his energies to the paltry distraction of who would be the next American president, since he was wholly absorbed in the more monumental matter of feeding Luella lunch. She’d been in restraints for two days in a row, and they weren’t running Guantánamo. To prevent muscle cramping and pressure sores, they alternated lashing her to the chair with a four-foot leash. This being a leash day made shoving protein down her throat more difficult. Jayne had begged him not to feed Luella cheese. If his stepmother got constipated, in lieu of hard-to-come-by enemas or laxative tablets, one of them would have to dig the shit from her anus with their fingers. But cheese was easier to force her to chew than chicken. With Jayne barricaded in her Quiet Room, Carter, a bit spitefully, chose the cheddar.
This time, however, Luella didn’t seem in the mood for her sélection de fromage, and after noshing the first chunk into a viscous paste she spewed it halfway across the kitchen, spraying Carter’s cheek in the process. Thereafter, she picked bits nimbly off her nightgown with dinner-party fastidiousness.
“You’re not worth your father’s little finger,” she said distinctly.
These moments of lucidity always threw him for a loop, and if the sentiment she’d expressed had been nicer it might have moved him to gentleness. Instead, on the next hunk, he clapped his hand around her mouth to keep the cheese in. Luella reached around and grabbed a fistful of his precious remaining tresses and pulled for all she was worth.
Okay, that was it. Wiping a saliva-smeared palm on a dishtowel, Carter marched from the room. She could starve for all he cared. “Jayne!” he shouted up the stairwell. “You’re going to have to watch Luella, because I’ve been tearing my hair. I’m going out for some air.”
Marginally becalmed by a well-earned constitutional, Carter returned about an hour later, planning on a couple of Advils for his aching knees. A singe smote his nostrils the moment he unlocked the door. Had Jayne burned a casserole? The formerly passionate recipe clipper rarely boiled an egg. A haze fogged the hallway, and Luella, last left leashed to a table leg, was too quiet.
He rushed into the kitchen to find the candle for port-sipping marital debriefings lit. Eyes gleaming, Luella was fluttering a flaming paper napkin into the open trashcan. The cheese wrapper on top caught fire. As Luella must have been sticking everything within reach into the candle and tossing incendiary projectiles every which way, Carter’s immediate extinguishing of the candle was starting a bit small. The curtains were on fire. The trashcan was on fire. A patch of linoleum was on fire, right around the table leg to which Luella was still attached. As smoke thickened rapidly, the choice was stark: try to save the house or the people in it. Well. All that liberal upbringing proved good for something.
Did I leave them out?” Jayne wondered weakly. “I worry I left them out.”
“Whoever did, I should have noticed them,” Carter said. “But isn’t that our luck. Holds a fork by the tines, but still remembers how to strike a match.”
They were huddled across the street in the blankets Carter had grabbed to protect them from being scorched. New York’s finest had taken their time, though at this point he was amazed that there was a fire department. The blaze wasn’t contained. In the glow, Luella danced with pagan glee.
“You didn’t have to rescue her, you know,” Douglas said heavily.
“I, ah—had a single moment of hesitation,” Carter admitted. “It gave me the creeps.”
For the better part of the last year, Avery had taken refuge in toil: scrubbing, dishwashing, mending, chopping, and laundry. She arranged neighborhood hand-me-down swaps of children’s clothes. To combat Bing’s give-away weight gain, she led him in sets of jumping jacks (she got the idea from Nollie), because pantry pilfering was a perfect formula for becoming a pariah. Swallowing her umbrage, she coached Goog on his Spanish. She only panicked when she ran out of tasks. Drudgery was therapeutic. Were she ever to start another practice, she’d have all her patients mop the office floor.
Besides, she had committed to this refurbished persona out of cold calculation. The alternative was to continue to cede the moral high ground to her sister, who would keep laying claim to competence, grit, efficiency, stoicism, selflessness, and her famous practicality, so that everyone would feel grateful to Florence, and Avery’s children would look up to Florence, and come to Florence with their problems, and her husband might wonder why he had chosen a weepy sniveler over this pillar of fortitude. Petulance, too, could not manifest provender or privacy if it couldn’t even manifest toilet paper. Spiked with an acute awareness of how unattractive the propensity looks to others, the experience of petulance was itself a small torture; it was a thin, sharp, needling emotion and ultimately a form of self-abuse. In sum, Avery could not control history. She could only control her disposition while history did its damnedest. Carrying on being a princess was lose-lose. To Avery’s delight, Florence sometimes seemed actively annoyed that her sister had become a saint—at points an even saintlier saint than the patron paragon of East Fifty-Fifth Street.
Thus it was in the midst of single-handedly cleaning up after yet another big communal dinner that Avery dried her hands hastily to answer the door. Through the peephole, her parents, Grand Man, and Luella were framed in curvature, faces sooted as if fresh from a coalmine, wrapped in blankets like squaws.
“What the fuck!” In her shock on opening the door, she forgot to watch her mouth around Grand Man.
Her father announced with a curious triumph, “Luella burned down the house.”
In short order, the news spread, and everyone but Savannah—out doing what her mother dared not contemplate—convened in the living room. Amidst many an aghast “Oh, my God!,” hurried inquiries about whether the four disaster victims were all right, and homilies about what really mattered was having escaped with their lives, Avery could detect a collective anxiety murmuring barely below the surface: this untoward turn of events brought this bursting abode’s population to fourteen—or, if you credited her father’s previous proclamations about how Luella alone was “the equivalent of twenty extra residents in their right minds,” to thirty-three.
They ceded seats to their new guests. Lowering himself onto the distinguished claret sofa with which he’d grown up, Grand Man shot a woeful look at the duct tape.
“Our brave troops, gold mining in Brooklyn,” Florence said cryptically. “Nollie? I was going to make everyone tea, but if you could spare it …”
“Fuck tea,” Nollie said, heading with Florence to the kitchen. “I have a new batch of killer hooch that’ll take your head off.”
“Did you manage to save anything?” Avery asked, rehearsing an array of childhood keepsakes in their attic.
“It’s missing a few pieces that were in the sink, I’m afraid,” Dad said, flapping his blanket back to reveal a scarred but regal wooden box in his lap. “But I did rescue the silver service.”
Grand Man burst into tears. “You didn’t tell me!” Avery had never seen him cry.
“I was saving it. I figured on a night like this,” Dad said, “I wouldn’t have many surprises of a happy sort to spring.” He removed one of the dinner knives, with a large scrolled M at the base, and the blade caught the light.
“It’s magnificent!” Kurt exclaimed. He was the kind of guy who would resist class distinctions on ideological grounds, yet instinctively think more highly of their family for bearing talismans of noble birth. Avery didn’t entirely buy into the notion of American aristocracy herself, whereas her sister aggressively rejected elitism as offensive. But Esteban had been right, back when the Stackhouses first moved in: all the Mandibles felt special, if only, in Florence’s case, special for refusing to feel special. Like the larger tussle over American “exceptionalism,” the family’s tensions over are-we-or-aren’t-we-special could now be put to rest. All the sumptuous fine craftsmanship in Bountiful House in Mount Vernon—the carved oak paneling, the curling banisters, the storied oriental carpets, the grand piano, the bone china for fifty—was officially reduced to an incomplete set of silverware and a sofa bandaged with duct tape. That should have been a little saddening, even to Karl Marx.
“If you want to head back to Carroll Gardens tomorrow morning and see what’s left to salvage,” Kurt volunteered, “I’ll give you a hand. Unless it’s still an inferno, scavengers will be all over that place within the day, and they’ll strip it clean.”
“You’re at least covered by insurance?” Esteban said.
Dad rubbed his neck. “I don’t know.”
“What do you mean, you don’t know?” Mom said.
“Our payments are up to date,” Dad said. “But I saw on the news last week that Titan Corp. has gone under. It’s a legal morass. I don’t know where that leaves us, but settling a claim could be messy.”
“You’d have a good case, if you haven’t been formally notified of cancellation,” Lowell said. “But Titan’s gone into Chapter Seven—total liquidation—and the line of creditors will be out the door. Even if you do get a settlement, it could be years before you see the money.”
“And it won’t be pegged to inflation,” Willing said from the stairwell. “In which case, a check for the contents of all three floors will buy you a cheap suit.”
“You’re just a one-note wonder, aren’t you?” Lowell told his nephew sourly.
“Why didn’t you tell me our insurance company was bankrupt?” Mom exclaimed.
“I was going to look into it.” Dad had that look of trying to control himself in front of other people, as if with no one else around he’d be screeching. “After I tried to give Luella a bath without drowning both of us, after I cut Luella’s nails if only to keep her from clawing my eyes out, and after I cleaned up the shards of the platter from Tuscany that we thought was on a shelf she couldn’t reach. Speak of the devil, someone had better go find her.”
Avery slipped off, checking the basement first, because she didn’t want her family’s few remaining possessions ravaged by a five-foot-ten enfant terrible. In her PhysHead practice, she’d treated patients with dementia. They’d been universally sweet and submissive, if perhaps lost or disconcerted, on occasion very insistent, but never, like Luella, reputedly, violent or destructive. So Avery had been skeptical of her parents’ accounts. Now that her own clothes were in danger of being shredded, it seemed prudent to take their version of events at face value.
She located her stepgran in the upstairs bathroom, where Luella was spurting shampoo in great decorative swirls around the tub, walls, and floor. Taking the bottle away from her was like wresting a tennis ball from the jaws of a rottweiler. Avery had found her parents’ practice of keeping their charge on a leash a ghastly violation of an adult’s civil liberties. Yet the nylon strap was invaluable for tugging the woman downstairs.
“The adventurer returns,” Avery announced, trying to sound jolly, then handing her youngest the nearly empty bottle. “Bing, honey? Unscrew the top, and see if you can scoop up any of the shampoo Luella accidentally spilled.” Rescuing shampoo was a perfect job for her thirteen-year-old. He couldn’t eat it.
“God, what’s that smell?” Goog said, glowering on the sidelines. Not fleshy, but with rounded corners—nose snub, shoulders sloped—he was blunt in every sense.
“I think she needs changing,” Avery whispered to her mother.
“I have no doubt,” Mom said. “But my house just burned down. Why are you telling me that?”
“Maybe Nollie should do the honors,” Dad said, accepting an ersatz screwdriver from his sister without saying thank you. “It’s her stepmother, too.”
“I don’t know how,” Nollie said flatly.
“I didn’t know how to fasten a square of old bedspread on a flailing grown woman two years ago, either,” Dad said. “You’ve always been a quick study. Everyone says so.”
“Oh, I’ll do it,” Florence said. “We have to remember, Luella’s not to blame. In a few years, one of us might need the same—”
“I’ve done it hundreds of times!” Dad cut her off. “Your aunt could do it once!”
Then the powwowing over where everyone would sleep. Kurt abdicated the sofa to the family patriarch and volunteered to doze in the armchair. Willing offered his room to his grandparents, suggesting Goog take Savannah’s mattress in the basement. When Mom wondered why on earth her granddaughter would be out all night, Avery pretended she hadn’t heard the question.
“And doesn’t our own Mrs. Rochester belong in an attic?” Dad proposed. He was seething so at his sister that you’d think it was Nollie who’d burned his house down.
“I’ll stay with Nollie,” Willing intervened. The suggestion was politic—Nollie wouldn’t permit anyone but Willing in her sanctum—but still left up in the air where on earth they’d bed down “Mrs. Rochester,” since Luella was the card no one cared to get stuck with in this game of Old Maid. Avery, for one, didn’t want their incontinent ward in the basement with a passion bordering on hysteria. After only a couple of hours with that harridan in the house, she now better appreciated the cravenness with which she’d always elected to do laundry in East Flatbush—anything but look after Luella so that her parents could enjoy a night off. Even now, guilt over having ducked geriatric babysitting was overwhelmed by a resolve to keep ducking it.
Yet as matters turned out, all the horse-trading over pallets and pillows was pointless.
The doorbell rang. The house was crowded, but with people who knew and, after a fashion (though it could be hard to tell), loved each other, the ground floor teemed with the energy of a big party. So when Avery went to answer the door, she proclaimed over the hubbub, “Are there any more relatives out in the cold we might have forgotten?” She said this gaily. That was the word, gaily.
She recognized the family through the peephole as neighbors from a couple of streets over—the Wellingtons, or Warburtons, something with a W. The woman (Tara? Tilly?) had participated in Avery’s last hand-me-down exchange, and had seemed grateful for Bing’s jeans (which, alas, he had outgrown on the lateral axis).
“Hello!” Tara/Tilly cried on the stoop, clasping her three-year-old to her breast. “We need help! It’s an emergency, please!”
Never rains but it pours. Having lobbied with unseemly fervor to keep Luella from bedding down in the basement, Avery welcomed an opportunity to act generous, and opened the door.
“My little girl,” the mother went on, bouncing the child. “She’s awfully sick. We have to get her to the hospital. We can’t find a taxi, and the ER at Kings County won’t send ambulances to this neighborhood because they’re getting hijacked. We’re so sorry to interrupt your evening, but I know you have a car …”
Avery frowned. “You sure know how to pick your nights. My parents’ house just burned down.” Naturally competitive, she trumped their heartache with a higher-value catastrophe.
“You know how disasters seem to happen all at once,” the father said gamely.
“Yes,” Avery said with a quick smile. “My husband calls it karmic clumping.”
“We could just borrow the Jaunt, if you’re busy,” the drawn woman said.
Something snagged in Avery’s head when the neighbor cited the very make of their vehicle, the sort of fine detail to which parents of seriously sick children would be oblivious. But it was parked out front, so the noticing probably meant nothing.
“No, I guess I could drive you,” Avery said. “Hold on and let me get my keys.”
“Please …?” the mother beseeched. “Could we have a glass of water for Ellie? She’s burning up.”
“Sure, no problem.” Avery hesitated; she couldn’t shut the door in their faces. “Come in for a sec. It’s freezing, and I don’t want to leave the door open.”
The family piled into the foyer. “Tanya, remember?” Clutching the child with one arm, the woman shook Avery’s hand. Freckles always made people look friendly.
The husband kept his right hand in his coat pocket and merely nodded: “Sam.” He was squarely built with Italianate good looks, but his limbs were spindly. A deferent bearing of earlier encounters replaced by a clenched rigidity, he seemed determined to get his daughter medical attention, regardless of whom he inconvenienced. “And this is Jake.” About eleven, the redhead winced into his father’s trousers. Avery recognized the jeans.
“Quite a crowd,” Tanya said, as her family huddled at the entrance to the living room.
“Nothing like losing the house where you grew up for an impromptu family reunion,” Avery said.
Tanya reached to squeeze her husband’s left hand. Willing was following the proceedings from his usual perch on the stairs. He met the eyes of the boy, who drew more tightly against his father’s leg and glared. Not a polite expression when your parents were shopping for a favor.
Once Avery returned with water, Tanya stood holding the glass as if looking for a place to put it down. Wasn’t Ellie thirsty? Avery dangled the key fob. Sam withdrew his right hand from his coat pocket and pulled out a gun.
She wondered why anyone shouted, “Freeze!” when pointing a firearm. Perfect immobility was instinctive. “That’s not necessary,” Avery said quietly. “I said I’d drive you.”
“We’re not going anywhere.” Sam leveled the handgun at her chest. “You are.”
“I don’t understand what you want,” Avery said. “What about your little girl …?”
“She’ll be fine,” Tanya said.
Avery felt like an idiot. She prided herself on having grown streetwise in the face of hardship. But underneath the broken fingernails from doing her own cleaning flitted a Washington social butterfly. In terms of her expectations of others, she still lived in a world of lunch dates, coffee klatches, and charity runs for breast cancer—a world in which the worst thing that arrived on your doorstep was a dinner party guest with an insultingly cheap bottle of red. The clincher: until not long ago, that was the same world that Sam and Tanya W-something inhabited, too. Having moved in with the wave of moneyed homebuyers that hit the neighborhood in the last decade, the desperadoes in this foyer were “gentry.”
“I’ll take that,” Sam said, reaching for the key fob.
“I thought you weren’t going anywhere,” Avery said. Willing had stood up. The bubble of conversation in the living room had died.
“You never know,” Sam said.
“Is this a robbery?” Avery used her full voice. The others needed to know what was up. “Because aside from the Jaunt, there’s not much to take here. Hinges?” she said defiantly. “We have plenty of hinges.”
“You have one big item to take,” Sam said. “Sometimes the elephant in the room is the room.”
“When you’re waving that thing around isn’t a good time to be obscure,” Avery said.
“I’ll say I’m sorry, once.” Sam panned the weapon across the living room. “In happier days, we’d have you around for a drink. But our house is in foreclosure, and we’ve been evicted. They’ve replaced the locks, set the alarm, changed the code.”
“So when the police came by to kick you out, why didn’t you shoot them?” Avery asked, glowering at the sidearm.
“Police!” Sam said. “What police? The banks all hire private security firms now. Armed to the eyeballs. Thugs.”
“What are you, then?”
“I don’t care what you call me. Because there is nothing I won’t do to put a roof over my family’s head. Your roof. I’m afraid you’re all going to have to leave.”
The room emitted a collective gasp.
“In my day,” Grand Man piped up, “any reputable American man facing ruin would shoot his own family. And then himself. Tradition was efficient. Like the self-cleaning oven.”
“See, we have elderly people here,” Avery said. “Infirm people. You can’t throw them on the street.”
“I can, and will.” The gun barrel betrayed a tremble, but it was insufficiently pronounced to guarantee that valiant funny business would succeed.
“For pity’s sake, we just lost everything!” her mother cried. “I suffer from debilitating clinical anxiety! High stress levels could bring on arrhythmia—fibrillation—hyperventilation—!”
“Mom,” Avery said quietly.
“Yeah, I’ve been diagnosed with OCD, restless leg syndrome, and an allergy to sulphites,” Sam said. “Then I got real problems. Maybe you should take the same cure.”
“This is my house,” Florence said, pulling from Esteban’s protective embrace. “We’re not renting, this is my house. By law.”
“Of which possession is nine-tenths,” Sam said.
“How do you know we don’t have guns?” Florence said furiously.
“You’re not the type,” he said.
“Honey,” Tanya said. “You weren’t the type, either.”
“I am now, baby.” The swagger was unconvincing.
“You’ll never get away with this!” Goog said hotly. “My dad’ll report you, and you’re both gonna get put away until you’re a hundred and ten!”
“Not keeping up with the news, are you, son?” Sam said wearily. “The cops have given up. Home invasions are all over town. Where do you think we got the idea?”
“Home persuasion,” Luella said, leashed to the lower banister. “Prone occasion. Peroration! Prestidigitation!” She’d once wielded an impressive vocabulary.
“But these are good people,” Kurt said over the Greek chorus. “Generous people. I’m technically a tenant, but Florence and Esteban haven’t asked for any rent in eighteen months. They’ve taken in a whole other family, an elderly relative … Florence works for a homeless shelter, for God’s sake—”
“All right, and I was a climate change modeler for the New York Academy of Sciences,” Sam snapped. “This isn’t a Sunday school contest.”
“We can see how badly you all need shelter.” Appearing to exert tremendous self-control, Florence had reverted to the methodic, nonreactive mode she must have refined at Adelphi. “Obviously, this is an emergency. So there’s no reason why we can’t make room for your family, too. We still have water, even hot water, and heating … You could all have showers. Long, relaxing showers. And you must be hungry. We don’t have much, but I’m sure I could find something for you and your children to eat. You can put down the gun. We can solve this problem together. Come to think of it, Esteban and I could give your family the whole master bedroom—”
“You’d live peaceably alongside a guy who just tried to throw you out of your own home at gunpoint?” Sam said. “Please. You’d bide your time until you could coldcock me with a hammer.”
“All the same, honey,” Tanya whispered. “The kids haven’t eaten all day—”
“She can rustle up something in that kitchen, then we can, too. Between a whole house and one room? I don’t feel especially torn.”
“Ever hear of the sit-in?” Dad snarled, huddled in his sooty blanket like an extra in The Ten Commandments. “When I was a kid, college students figured out just how hard it is to remove large numbers of heavy, thrashing, righteously pissed-off people who refuse to leave.”
“Yeah, and some of those numb-nuts protesters got shot.” Sam was growing impatient. “Now, I’ll give you fifteen minutes to gather a few things. I don’t have to, but I’ll let you keep your coats. Take your toothbrushes.”
“Kurt’s right about my niece’s generosity, but her aunt has a mean streak,” Nollie snarled like a crazy old lady who lured little boys with gingerbread, and Jake shrank in terror. “First thing I’ll advise Florence to do is cut off your utilities. So much for those showers.”
“Go ahead,” Sam tossed back, though he looked rattled. “Everybody’s jury-rigging hookups to the grid anyway, and tapping into gas lines for free.”
“There’s only four of you, hombre,” Esteban said, putting on an accent like the Mexican lowlife whom honks like Sam would fear. “Two are niños. How you expect to control thirteen hostages not in the mood for a midnight stroll?”
“Good point. Very helpful—muy útil, sí?” His pronunciation was faultless. Beckoned, poor Bing edged wide-eyed to within reach, and to Avery’s horror Sam took a firm grip on her petrified boy’s arm. “Anyone tries anything, I shoot the kid. Think I won’t? Don’t try me.”
Sam was talking himself into this role, but Avery couldn’t discount the possibility that he would do so with some success. Released to “gather a few things,” they all just stood there.
“Move it,” Sam said. “Or I’ll take back the offer, and you’ll be shuffling Linden Boulevard in socks.”
“Why did you pick on us?” Avery asked Tanya as the others slowly, as if in a trance, dispersed. “This house is home to fourteen people.”
Tanya explained, “Because you’re the only ones who let us in.”