through a difficult day, quaking with private grief. She would do the kind thing. She took a step toward the woman.
“Are you all right?” she said, interrupting the tour. “Can I help you?”
As she spoke, she noticed 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. Corey had already spotted them, was hurrying to open the door for Viv.
She had just been thinking of her children and now here they were, as though her thought had given them body. She was pleased—self-congratulatory—that they had arrived when she was engaged in an act of compassion.
“Would you like to take a seat?” she said to the woman.
Behind the quaking woman, not visible to the quaking woman, Viv was racing through the door, through the small crowd; Ben was attempting to fling himself out of Erika’s arms, reaching in the direction of his mother.
The woman was staring at her, fearful, fragile. She reached to catch the woman in case she fell. But the woman backed away from her, edging closer to the glass case containing the Bible, closer to the doorway where the children had just entered.
The woman reached one hand high up into the air and placed one hand against her stomach. She was crying. Then she reached under her sweatshirt, pressed herself somewhere, and detonated.
PART 4
1
The metallic scrape of the slanted cellar doors (they had never quite joined properly), steel on brick, that familiar painful yank, the sound aching in her teeth.
It was early yet; she assumed she would be waking her. But coming down the steep stairs she saw that she was already awake, perhaps long awake, sitting cross-legged on the worn-out rug in the flat morning light, eerily alert. None of the lamps were on; so she had been waiting in the dark. The futon was in its couch form. The sheets and blanket were folded tidily upon it. The guitars and the banjo and the cello stood undisturbed in their stands, the keyboard and speakers and mixing board unplugged.
She wondered if it brought any solace to her, this space, which she had always found at once comforting and mysterious, the way it smelled of him and mildew and rosin and coffee and Scotch and laundry detergent and spiders.
She wondered if she had slept at all, or if she had just been being polite when she accepted the linens and clothing passed down the concrete stairs last night.
“You came,” Moll observed, remaining seated on the dusty rug.
Molly bristled. The words, which should have evoked her pity, which should have exposed to her a heartsick woman waiting apprehensive in darkness, instead evoked only irritation. She considered not speaking. She considered refusing to go through with it. She imagined buying a padlock for the bulkhead doors, entrapping and starving her adversary. But then she felt, like an actual finger pointing, Moll’s calculating gaze on her forehead.
“He’s in his high chair,” Molly said, untying the belt of her blue robe and starting to pull off her pajama pants. “I gave her a pile of Cheerios to feed him one by one.”
She stripped down to her underwear. Moll followed suit, removing the old sweatpants and T-shirt that neither of them would ever miss from the messy bottom drawer of the dresser. They swapped clothing and redressed quickly. Molly stole a glance at Moll’s body. She couldn’t tell if Moll (she) was attractive or not.
The basement was cool but the clothes were warm from Moll. Molly disliked the warmth.
Her phone, in the pocket of the robe lying on the floor between them, began to buzz. They both reached for it. Moll fell back and allowed Molly to scramble, searching for the phone in one pocket before locating it in the other. David, requesting a video chat. Decline.
Molly kept the phone, and the keys from the same pocket, but handed the robe to Moll. They both shivered. Molly found it ominous, that simultaneous shiver.
“So go,” Molly said curtly.
Moll hesitated.
“Go,” she repeated, unsure how long her vexation, her rage, could hold before giving way to tears.
“So I’ll do all of today, through bedtime,” Moll said, “and then you can do late tonight and tomorrow before and after work, and I’ll do tomorrow night.”
Molly couldn’t tell whether this was a question or a declaration, but the swiftness of Moll’s words, their practiced casualness, indicated that she had carefully prepared this proposition,