Not awaiting their responses, Roz vanished as abruptly as she had appeared.
“Okay, so,” Corey said in the silence that followed Roz’s departure. They were both long accustomed to Roz’s manner: curt, yet somehow charismatic. Then, looking right at Molly, Corey said: “Kids getting the best of you?”
“What?” she said, suddenly self-conscious. Was it her eyes? Her skin? She tried hard to not look like a worn-out mother. To not look much like a mother at all, here at work. To dress androgynously and keep her exhaustion to herself.
“Relax!” Corey said. “Nothing. Just, I spied you last night from my car, running through the ShopMart parking lot. You were crying, weren’t you? I would’ve stopped but I was already in the left-turn lane.”
“I didn’t go there last night.”
“It’s okay,” he said. “Molly. I’ve been there. I wept openly at IKEA last weekend. The lighting section. Dazzling. David leave for Buenos Aires yet?”
“This morning. For a week plus. But seriously, it wasn’t me.”
“Okay. My bad.”
He seemed unconvinced. She was annoyed, but she considered herself the kind of person who got over annoyance quickly.
“Straight to recycling?” she said, pointing at the mail.
“Oh, didn’t Roz tell you? She thinks we should start filing all of it, now that we’re getting more every day. Just in case. I’ve been labeling file folders. Death Threats. Hell Threats. Threats to Our Families. Threats to Our Souls. Threats to Corey’s One-Night Stands.”
It was the kind of black humor that had served the three of them well in the weeks since word about the Bible had gotten out, but she found herself unable to smile.
“You’re doing the tour, right?” he said, glancing at his phone. “Friday’s yours.”
“Don’t tell me it’s eleven already.”
“Four minutes till. Thirty-three folks at my last tally. I counted from the bathroom window. I’ll be in my office if they turn out crazy, okay?”
9
She stood perfectly still, trapping Ben’s body (squirmy, squirmy) against her chest. She stared at the lid of the coffee table, trying to pretend she had imagined it.
She tuned in to Viv’s ongoing monologue: “…said, ‘Daddy, do you know where The Why Book is?’ and he said, ‘Mommy knows,’ so I said to you, ‘Mommy, do you know where The Why Book is?’ and you said, ‘Ask Daddy,’ remember? So then I asked B, and I know that B knows because I know that B hid it somewhere but he won’t tell me but maybe when he’s two and he can talk then I can ask him and then he can tell me where he hid The Why Book but now I’m kind of mad that he hid The Why Book when he’s a baby and can’t even tell me where he hid it. But I think Dorothy has The Why Book too so maybe we can go to her house and we can take her Why Book from her and then we can leave one thousand dollars under her pillow—”
“Vivian,” she interrupted, keeping her eyes on the coffee table. “I need you to do something really important right this second.”
“What?” Viv whispered, immediately quiet, alert.
“One, you need to get off the toilet all by yourself. Two, you need to go and open the hall closet. Three, you need to reach way into the back and find the bat. Four, you need to bring it back to me with your strong arms.”
“What about wiping my vagina?”
“You don’t have to do that this time.”
“Yay, I’m so excited to not wipe my vagina.”
“Do it now,” she said. “Do those four things right now.”
She could protect the mouth of the hallway while Viv went to get the weapon.
Maybe the mere mention of the bat had frightened the intruder.
Maybe she could bring the bat down again and again on the lid of the coffee table until the intruder was knocked out or dead and then she could call the police. Never have to see him at all, no thud of wood against skin, no face, no words.
10
She put the human milk in the fridge and pulled out the cow milk. She turned on the hot pot and tore open an Earl Grey packet and poured milk over the tea bag as she waited for the water to boil. It had occurred to her for the first time a couple weeks ago what a bizarre drink tea is, and now she had the thought whenever she made it: drench some dry leaves in hot water, pour the milk of a different species on top. A savage beverage, viewed in those terms, yet it was the civilizing force she needed before confronting the tour group.
She stepped out into the slight brightness of March. A variety of vehicles in the parking lot: a few gleaming rental cars, a dented minivan, a gaudily painted hippie van, a pair of motorcycles, a trio of bicycles. Corey had set out four rows of folding chairs beneath the awning that once shielded the gas pumps from the elements. It used to be just one row. Today, the thirty-plus members of the tour awaited her in the shade, sitting or standing, one young couple leaning against a defunct pump. Beyond them, the Phillips 66 sign, and beyond that, the Pit, and beyond that, the highway entrance ramp. From the highway, it looked like any old gas station next to an abandoned lot.
There were four children on the tour, which gladdened her; most adults were less likely to be aggressive in the presence of children. The kids (siblings, or five-minute friends?) chased one another around the Phillips 66 sign.
One by one the waiting people noticed her, the clipboard and the name tag, MOLLY NYE, BS GEOLOGY, MS BOTANY, and began to shush one another. This moment always moved her, no matter the size of the tour group: the human pact to grow quiet, to listen.
But now that word about the Bible had begun to spread, she disliked giving tours. She was nervous as she greeted this group. You never knew who you were going to get—religious crusaders or feminist crusaders, suspicious journalists or suspicious scholars, inquisitive stoners or inquisitive senior citizens.
It wasn’t the more ragged members of the tours who frightened her; the wildest in appearance were frequently the mildest in behavior. She couldn’t put it into words, the quality of those who made her uneasy; often they took the most innocuous form. Sometimes they would give her the creeps for no reason at all. Like that unremarkable woman a couple weeks back. Just a plain bony thirtysomething in jeans and a baseball cap and a sweatshirt slouching around at the back of the group, but there was something uncanny about her, something that kept pulling Molly’s gaze over as she went through the motions of giving the tour, so that she happened to notice how the woman pressed through the others to get closer to the glass case (Roz’s idea, once ticket sales spiked) containing the Bible. And Molly noticed when she began to tremble (though she was by no means the first to react strongly upon encountering the Bible). Their eyes met, such sad weak bloodshot eyes, how irrational and small of her to dislike this innocent person, she was about to interrupt the tour to say something to her, Are you all right, Can I help you, Would you like to take a seat?
But before she got the chance to do the kind thing, she was distracted by a flicker on the other side of the floor-to-ceiling gas station windows: a child running toward the building from the parking lot. A child who turned out to be Viv, followed by Erika carrying Ben. Sometimes Erika surprised her by bringing the kids over at the end of the workday on Friday. Corey was already hurrying to open the door for Viv, whom he adored. It was one of those rare sweet relaxed moments of motherhood: this late-afternoon tableau of her children with adults who delighted in them, this easy mingling of work and home, this effervescent eagerness to finish up the tour and seize the children. Viv raced through the door, through the small crowd, toward Molly; Ben attempted to fling himself out of Erika’s arms, reaching for his mother; the people on the tour laughed genially and parted to let them through; the woman moved aside only at the last second, seeming suddenly to notice the children, and half bowing to them, the slightest odd obsequious gesture, though perhaps Molly imagined it; then, Erika and Corey spirited the children away to the back offices. By the time Molly’s attention returned to the tour, the woman had disappeared. In the parking lot, a black rental car backed up too quickly.