and photographed before being handed over to the authorities in charge of artifacts. In an exquisite piece of luck, the Port Authority worker doing documentation that day had gone home early. Standing at the trailer’s door, Tommy knew what he had to do. It had proved absurdly easy for him to wheel the sculpture up a plank and into the back of his pickup and drive it home. He knew it would be weeks or months, possibly never, before anyone noticed it was missing. Among the piles of scorched debris—all the personal possessions and pieces of buildings and tires and cars and fire trucks and airplanes, who would even remember this thing? Who would think to ask where it had gone?
CHAPTER TWELVE
Melody had been sitting in her car outside the small consignment store on Main Street for almost an hour. Her coffee in the cup holder was cold. She was wasting gas because it was too chilly to turn the car off and sit for more than a few minutes without running the heat, but she still hadn’t worked up the nerve to go inside and talk to Jen Malcolm who owned the store and whom Melody knew a little bit because Jen also had children at the high school, two sons, and because Melody had occasionally sold a piece of furniture to Jen in the past. Items she’d bought and refinished but didn’t quite work in her house and were too nice, she thought, to sell on Craigslist and too bulky for eBay. Jen always liked the pieces Melody brought. Most of them sold, and Melody would earn a little extra money doing something she genuinely loved to do. Today’s errand felt different.
Melody turned the key in the ignition, cutting the exhaust but leaving it in the position where the radio would still play. When she got too cold, she told herself, she’d go inside and show Jen the photos of all the furniture in her house, the many pieces she’d spent years hunting down at flea markets and estate sales, her favorite finds, the valuable items acquired for a song from sellers who didn’t know any better: a neglected Stickley table that someone had criminally sponge painted, now stripped and restored; a black leather Barcelona chair pocked with cigarette burns and other unsavory stains she’d reupholstered in a bright turquoise tweed; and her favorite, a beautiful oak drafting table that tilted. Nora and Louisa had used it for years to draw or do homework or just sit, side by side, reading a book. She would sell all of it to appease Walt and slow him down. She would sell anything. Almost.
MELODY KNEW NORA AND LOUISA called her the General behind her back, but she didn’t care. She didn’t care because she also knew what it was like to grow up in a state of anarchy, in a house with parents so hands-off they were nearly invisible. Melody knew what it was like to have teachers ask, hesitant and concerned, if her parents were going to come to a parent-teacher conference. She knew what it was like to search in vain for their faces in the school auditorium during a play or a concert. She’d vowed to be an entirely different type of mother, and having twins never set her off course. Some days she drove herself crazy, running from one daughter’s after-school activity to the other’s. She charted the time spent with each child, making sure to even it out as far as was humanly possible. She never missed a single concert, play, soccer game, track meet, Brownie meeting, choral performance. She packed a healthy lunch every day, including one indulgent sweet on Fridays. She wrote them encouraging notes and arrived fifteen minutes early for pickup, so they would never stand in a parking lot alone, wondering if anyone was going to show up to bring them home, wondering if anyone even realized they were gone.
She remembered their first exploratory trips upstate as if they’d happened yesterday. Driving north, watching the scraggly city trees gradually replaced with the stately elms and elderly pines of the Taconic. Nora and Louisa asleep in their respective car seats in the back, both sucking away on identical pacifiers. Melody had instantly loved their small village with its quaint dress shops and bakeries, all the women pushing strollers while wearing jogging suits the color of sorbet. It was nothing like the grime and cacophony of their street that was technically in Spanish Harlem.
They