Talking about feeding the baby set off the inevitable physical reaction in her breasts. The nursing response still amazed her. The sound of a baby crying in the store was enough to get her body producing milk. Still, it was a secondary consideration at the moment. She'd have to nurse Connor when she got home, but only enough to take the pressure off. It wouldn’t be long before Clay realized she was gone, and he'd grab the first person with a car to see what she was up to.
Holly looked around. As casually as possible she grabbed her pocketbook from under the counter and left the store. As she got in the car and pulled out of her space, she kept looking in the rear view mirror, expecting to see Clay running out the door after her. She saw nothing but the ever-dwindling crowd of customers walking in and out.
She didn’t have much time.
* * *
“What are we going to do now? I say try Dexter's lumber down in Soledad. They're bound to have better stuff anyway.”
Margaret kept her eyes on the road. “Have you ever been there?”
“Well, no. But what choice do we have? We have to try someplace.”
Margaret found herself taking random turns, navigating through town but not having any real destination. Carl was right. What choice did they have? Not that she expected to find anything different wherever they went. Already, an alternative plan was forming in her mind. One that seemed so radically permanent in its scope that it frightened her to consider it.
Instead, she said simply, “What's the fastest way there?”
* * *
The temperature that day had reached eighty-nine degrees at its zenith. With the evening came a refreshing coolness pushed in from the ocean seventy-nine miles to the west. Daylight lingered longer every day, and as Margaret's crew gathered in her front yard at seven-thirty, she estimated they still had an hour of workable daylight left.
The store in Soledad had been more responsive, mostly because she hadn’t been recognized. It didn't take long for people to figure out who she was, and subsequently her purpose for the materials. Still, she and Carl had managed to get half of Estelle's list. As they left, the manager caught her at the door and in a beseeching tone asked her not to return. Carl's face burned with a newfound rage, but he kept any comments to himself. When Margaret explained that the man's customers would not need the wood in a month, his reaction was opposite that of the manager at the first store. He simply nodded his head and said, “I know that, ma’am. But that doesn’t change what my boss thinks, and that's where the decision comes from. I'm sorry.”
Margaret wondered if she'd ever been called “ma'am” this often before the dreams. Already, her alternate plan looked to be the only way out. She explained it to Carl on the way back to Lavish, and he’d shifted uneasily in his seat. His ranting about the “lunacy” of the plan made her begin to doubt his belief in what was going to happen. She told him so, in quiet, hurt words. He fell silent, and as they'd approached the town common to call everyone together, he simply muttered, “It just seems so much like the point of no return.”
The point of no return , she thought. So be it.
Margaret explained her intentions to the group when they’d re-gathered on her front lawn. They would have to be careful not to cause the house to collapse on top of the supplies being stored in the basement – the glue, forty gallons of heavy black grease unopened since being delivered a month earlier, and the harnesses. If the worst happened, she supposed they would simply excavate it all from under the rubble and move on. Everything between this evening and the eighth of June would have to be this way. If it hadn’t been obvious before, it was now.
Her home was a lumber mine, waiting for excavation. What choice did she have left?
As she outlined her idea, no one objected. They simply stared at her in what she took as silent resignation. The cynical side of herself thought, Of course, it’s not their house we’re about to demolish.
“Estelle, what exactly do we need, measurements and everything?”
The woman adjusted her wheelchair to face the group. As she read off the list, rattling off the measurements for each piece still needed, Margaret broke people into groups, told them which room to use, and sent them in. Carl had temporarily shut off the power. Even so, Margaret sent each group in with, “And be wary of the wires. Don’t mark anything for cutting above an electrical outlet if you can help it.”
She accompanied Carl and Al up the ramp, which had become the only way into the front door since Tony Donato retrofitted the porch for Estelle. Every time she walked into her house, Margaret imagined herself boarding the ark. Each time she entered her home, there were butterflies in her stomach, a fear slowly building in her gut, reminding her how far she'd come in only a month with the complete dismantling of her life.
Katie was inside, watching with horror as people began removing photographs, dragging the china cabinet aside to expose a large section of bare wall. Margaret looked at her daughter but said nothing. She'd deliberately specified to everyone that the girls' room was off-limits. Katie was lost enough these days, and Robin had begun having her own tantrums, emulating her big sister. Neither needed to see their last refuge taken apart piece by piece.
The expression on Katie’s face when she looked at her mother cut a hole in Margaret's heart. But the girl said nothing, simply turned and ran into her room. Margaret heard her screaming once the door was shut, accompanied now and then by something hitting the walls.
She tried to put it out of her mind. Now that she was inside, she realized the amount of daylight had been misleading. Inside, a shadowy gloom pervaded every room. With the power off, it was already too dark to see any detail.
“Clear stuff away,” she repeated as she went room-to-room, “snd try to measure and draw out, but let's hold off on any cutting. It's too dark to risk any mistakes.” She sent Carl back downstairs to turn on the master power. Soon, every house light was on. Every bare wall had large rectangles drawn in marker or crayon across the wallpaper. They would cut each piece as big as possible, then trim to what was needed. The walls were plaster board. Margaret didn’t think they would work as well as straight plywood. But it might work for inside walls, especially coated with shipper’s glue. They’d have to wait and see.
People marked their cutting for the next day across wallpaper and painted walls, across the dark paneling of Vince's old den. Margaret reluctantly wandered into Katie’s room. The girl was on her bed, the lamp on its side atop the dresser, still lighted. The girl sobbed into her pillow. On the other bed, Robin sat upright, holding a stuffed dog. She stared with quiet, sad eyes at her sister.
Margaret sat on the side of the bed and reflexively ran her hand across Katie's back. Both of them tensed. She waited for the girl to explode with renewed rage against her crazy mother. Instead, Katie rolled towards her, half crawling along the bed, and crumpled in her mother's lap, still sobbing, but now crying against Margaret. She never spoke, nor looked up. But that one small gesture, and the sudden appearance of Robin on the bed beside her, hugging her mother and crying a little herself, told her that, at least among her small family, things might be all right.