"You done in there?" Sean said.
"Done," Megan said, "yes. Finished. Through." She plunked herself dispiritedly into one of the wooden chairs by the scrubbed-oak kitchen table and briefly dropped her head into her hands, rubbing her eyes. "Everything is going to pieces, and the world is coming to an end."
Sean, still halfway into the fridge, said only, "Good, then no one has to go out and get milk."
"We wouldn't need to get it three times a day," Megan said, "if all you guys didn't drink it as if it came out of the faucet."
"I'm a growing boy," Sean said.
"You're twenty-one going on twenty-two, your bones are through growing, so don't give me that!"
"Speaking of which," Sean said, withdrawing his tall blond self, closing the door and heading out of the kitchen and down toward the den, "what are you getting me for my birthday?"
Megan looked at the ceiling as if imploring it for help, but no help came. The door leading to the hallway, the den and the bedrooms now merely produced another brother, this time dark-haired Mike, in jeans and sneakers and a bodyform T-shirt presently radiating in traveling abstract calligraphic patterns of blue and green on navy blue. He also opened the fridge, put his upper body into it, and a moment later came out with a large stack of cold- cut packages. These Mike carried over to the counter, where he rooted around in a cupboard over the work surface, acquiring a bottle of mustard and a small shake-on container of the deadly chili powder that he had been putting on everything lately. Mike then got a loaf of rye bread out of the breadbox on the counter and began hastily assembling something that bore the same resemblance to a sandwich that the Leaning Tower of Pisa did to more normal buildings.
Megan watched this performance with the resigned expression of a farmer on some African savannah watching the locusts make their scheduled descent onto the landscape one more time. "You might leave some of that for someone else," Megan said, in a tone of voice meant to convey a very strong hint.
"Why? They'd just eat it," Mike said, finishing the building of the sandwich. He took down a plate from the cupboard, moved the sloppy and unstable construction onto it with some difficulty, and carried it out of the kitchen. Megan prayed earnestly for an earth tremor, but none came.
She sat there at the table for a few more moments. I really should eat something, Megan thought. But whether from the events in her virtual arena, or from watching Mike throw together his snack, her appetite was now completely gone.
She could hear someone coming down the hall again, but to her intense relief it wasn't another of her brothers. It was her dad-tall, balding a little on top, dressed in jeans and a soft work shirt with the sleeves rolled up, holding his pipe in one hand, a Holmesian antique "deerstalker" meerschaum of which he was inordinately proud. "Dad," Megan said, "I need your professional help."
"What's the problem?"
"I want to kill my brothers in some way that can never be traced back to me."
Her father the mystery writer raised his eyebrows as he opened one of the kitchen drawers and started going through it, apparently looking for a pipe cleaner. "I have a few interesting new methods on tap this week. But all of them require considerable preparation, and no witnesses. And your conscience will still pain you afterward."
"Hah," said Sean, heading back into the kitchen and shrugging into an overslick as he went. "She doesn't have one. Six days till my birthday, Meg."
The door slammed behind him. "You see my point?" Megan said to her dad.
Her father turned around, leaning on the drawer to push it closed, and began performing the nearest thing to single bypass surgery on his pipe. "Your mother and I have invested a lot in their educations," he said mildly. "I'd hate to assist in their murder before we see some kind of return on our investment. Unless, or course, you're in a position to guarantee that you're going to make a salary the size of all their salaries combined."
"Plus twenty percent," Mike said as he came in the kitchen door again, putting his own jacket on, "and my birthday's coming up, too" He hurried out the back door after Sean.
Megan looked after him in mild annoyance. "You see what I put up with," she said.
Her father sighed. "More clearly than you imagine. Honey, have you had a bad day? My keen eye for observation suggests there's a certain sense-of-humor loss in the air." He removed the pipe cleaner he was working with from the pipe stem, eyed the horrible color it had become, chucked it into the garbage can and went looking in the drawer for another.
'That's a bad habit," Megan said. "You should give it up."
"I smoke one pipe a week. I breathe more smog than that in a day. Don't try to change the subject, honey. What's the matter?"
She told him about her afternoon's practice, the malfunctioning model-assuming that the malfunction was its and not Megan's-and Wilma's sudden departure.
Her father looked down the pipe's mouth, took the stem off and began reaming it out again. "A little unusual. And her mother said-what? That Burt had left home?"
"It sounded that way."
"This the first you've heard of this?"
Megan raised her eyebrows. "Not as such." She sighed. "Dad, far be it from me to describe this as the perfect family-"
He gave her a slightly cockeyed look. "I wouldn't go quite that far myself. Especially since I pay the grocery bills."
"Yeah, well, that's not what I mean." She fiddled with the fringe on one of the knitted placemats on the table.
"You and Mom," Megan said, "are extremely good to us… compared to some parents."
Her father straightened, put the pipe aside. "Well," he said, "it's always dangerous to get judgmental about other people's family lives, their interrelationships. There are so many factors that make a big difference, but never get exhibited to the world at large. That makes it hard to figure out what's really going on."
"Not always," Megan said. "Dad… Burt takes a lot of.. well, it's emotional abuse, really. There's no other word for it. His folks… I don't go over there much. We try to make ways for Burt to get away, because really, when he's home, both his mother and his father ride him constantly. There's just nothing he can do right. They find fault with every single thing he does, no matter how innocent. And when they do start finding fault, they really yell at him. Not just cutting remarks, sarcasm, or whatever. It's scary, sometimes. If I heard you or Mom ever make that kind of noise about something, I'd faint."
"You might be surprised," her father said, sounding dry. "I've heard your mother's end of some of the editorial conferences for TimeOnline. Pretty rough stuff."
"Maybe it is. But, Daddy, you've never treated any of us that way. I can't imagine what that kind of thing would be like, coming from your own parents. And Burt's been putting up with it for years."
Megan leaned back in the chair. "Lately he's been starting to mention not putting up with it anymore. Getting out. But Burt's never been clear about exactly where he planned to get out to. I don't think he had a lot of money saved, for one thing. If he's got enough money to move out, all of a sudden, I'd think maybe he'd robbed a bank or something… I don't know where else Burt would be getting it."
Her father brooded for a few moments, turning the half- pipe over in his hands, then fitting the stem to it again.
"Are there friends who might have given him a place to stay?"
"Not that I know of. I mean, none who wouldn't tip his mother off right away once they got a feeling for what was going on. If he's staying with someone, it's nobody from school, I'd bet, or from the riding crowd. Someone none of us know." Megan began tying the bit of fringe into a knot. "But what's going to drive poor Wilma right around the bend is not knowing. She's seriously freaked already. If Burt doesn't at least get in touch with her to let her know he's okay, wherever he is, Wilma's going to get even more frayed at the edges."