He stood, his foot crushing one of the dead roaches on the bare slab. He winced, then carefully stepped on each of the roaches in sight. He shoved the crushed remains into the crack with the edge of his shoe, unmindful of the viscous smears they left on the concrete.
He turned to face Catherine.
“Come on.”
He picked up Sams, still crying softly, retrieved Catherine’s purse from its usual place on the end table by the couch, grabbed three coats from the closet, and was out the door, yelling “Hurry” over his shoulder, almost before Catherine could move to follow him
6
The clerk at Builder’s Bargain Barn looked askance when Willard slapped his Mastercard down on the counter next to the twelve aerosol cans of Raid and ten room foggers.
The clerk was an elderly woman with faintly bluish hair and a perpetually confused expression on her rather pinched face. She looked as if she should be home spoiling grandchildren rather than tending to a behemoth computerized register that usually required her to enter each purchase at least three times before the machinery would accept it. Her neatly blue bordered plastic name tag announced simply that she was “Marge.”
Fortunately, Marge did not say anything about Willard’s unusual purchases or about the harried expression that haunted Catherine’s eyes. She stolidly passed the electronic scanner over the pricing bars on one of the cans of Raid and looked curiously pleased-not to say surprised-when the register tallied the purchase price plus state tax times twelve…and on the first try.
As if on a roll and afraid to spoil her good fortune, Marge repeated the process with one of the home foggers. Her luck didn’t hold. Glancing up at Willard, she diligently re-keyed the necessary information-department, function code, quantity-and passed the scanner over the pricing bars again.
Still nothing.
She sighed and began the procedure one more time.
“Hurry it up,” Willard said, his impatience finally bursting through. He immediately regretted the outburst and tried to make what amends he could. “We got a real crop of roaches sprouting in the…” He faltered, realizing that the subject was not quite appropriate for the tone that was coming out.
Marge ignored both his initial comment and his explanation. For the fourth time she patiently and methodically entered the information. With all of the intent determination of someone not quite certain how to proceed next, she passed the scanner over the home fogger. This time, finally, the data jelled and the computer rang up price plus tax times ten.
Marge punched a final button and the LCD screen announced the total. She carefully bagged the cans while Willard swiped his card and scrawled his name at the bottom of the charge sheet. He jerked the bag from her almost before Marge had dropped in the last canisters, and took off for the door. Catherine, almost clutching Sams against her, followed close behind.
Willard did not see the odd look Marge sent after him. Instead, he concentrated on backing out of his parking spot, speeding down the narrow lane toward the highway, then driving home as quickly as possible.
Even so, by the time they arrived at the crest of Oleander, Sams had fallen into a restless sleep and Catherine had had enough time to read out the directions for the home foggers.
“You wait in here,” Willard said as he cut the engine in the driveway. “I’ll go set these and we’ll take Sams out for a couple of hours. When we get back, everything will be all right.”
“No,” Catherine said. “I’ll come help.”
She carefully lifted Sams from his car seat and carried him into the house, laying him in a makeshift bed of afghans and pillows on the living room sofa. While she was doing that, Willard emptied two Raid cans in the crack along the back wall, spraying until the fluid dripped stickily on the rough concrete of the fractured slab. He pulled more of the carpet back, from the portion of the back wall adjacent to the kitchen wall, across the room to the sliding patio doors, then on to the far wall-the one separating the living room from the fifth bedroom.
To clear the full width of the living room, he had to push an end table and a small corner cabinet toward the center of the carpet.
The crack continued the entire span of the wall-varying irregularly from one to four inches wide, and at least as deep as the foundation slab itself. Some places had sheered cleanly away; others were rough and crumbling.
He saturated every inch of exposed concrete with Raid.
When he was finished, he turned his attention to the kitchen.
The vinyl floor tile seemed unbroken along the outer wall, but when he knelt down and looked closer, he noticed odd ripples in the tiles next to the baseboards. On a hunch, he grabbed a sharp paring knife and punched the wall-edge of one of the tiles near the middle. The blade easily broke through. He wiggled the handle. The blade moved freely, swinging an inch or so forward and backward before grating against concrete.
He tried another spot midway between that one and the far corner of the kitchen. Same result.
“Shit,” he yelled, reversing the blade and slamming the end of the handle against the brittle, yellowing tile. The vinyl shattered, revealing a foot-long crack. He struck the next tile. The crack continued beneath it as well. Increasingly frustrated and angry, he grabbed another can of Raid and emptied it into the exposed opening.
He could see nothing at the bottom of the crack-the sunlight was too bright through the windows and cast too sharp a shadow at the base of the wall, but he wasn’t going to take any chances.
In the meantime, Catherine had resurrected half a dozen old packing boxes-not yet discarded-and was haphazardly stacking dishware, silverware, cooking utensils, and linens in them, emptying every closet and drawer in the kitchen. Fortunately, some of their things had not yet been unpacked; she was angry enough as it was and didn’t need the added aggravation of breaking china or glasses.
Finally, though, the kitchen was ready-prepared according to the explicit directions on the back of the fogger package.
“Get the pets,” Willard instructed, “while I get these ready.”
Catherine went back through the house and grabbed the double cage containing Yip and Yap, the boys’ hamsters, threw a heavy towel over the cage, and ran it out to the car. On her second trip, she carried Sams out and strapped him into his car seat.
Inside the house, Willard slid the removable plywood door into the doggie door, making sure that Will, Jr.’s dog-officially named Richard Beagle but mostly answering to “Crud,” Will’s favorite expletive-was safely blocked outside.
“A few hours in the cold won’t kill you,” Willard said when he heard the dog scrabbling at the plywood insert with his sharp nails. “It’s not as if you don’t have a perfectly good dog house out there. You just never use it.”
Ignoring any further complaints by Crud, Willard checked the rest of the house: interior doors open, windows closed.
Everything okay.
His last act before leaving the house was to set up four of the foggers: one in the kitchen, one in the family room that had started life as a garage and had been converted by the last owners, one in the intersection of living room and entry hall, and one at the end of the hall by the back bathroom door.
Holding his breath as he activated each of the foggers-and understanding all the while that it was not necessary to do so-he retraced his steps through the house and finally left, locking the front door securely behind him.
In the car, Sams was whining and restless. Yip and Yap were huddled beneath a pile of cedar chips in the corner of the cage. Already the car was assuming the bitingly ammoniac stench Willard associated with hamster cages at least two days beyond scheduled cleaning time. He wondered if he would ever get the smell out of the unpholstery.
Without speaking, he cranked the key and backed out of the driveway. He glanced at his watch.
Eleven fourteen. About two hours until Charter Oaks released classes. Another hour before Will’s school was out for the day. They would have to pick up the older kids from the school yards and find something to do for a good
