Avery frowned. “You sure know how to pick your nights. My parents’ house just burned down.” Naturally competitive, she trumped their heartache with a higher-value catastrophe.
“You know how disasters seem to happen all at once,” the father said gamely.
“Yes,” Avery said with a quick smile. “My husband calls it karmic clumping.”
“We could just borrow the Jaunt, if you’re busy,” the drawn woman said.
Something snagged in Avery’s head when the neighbor cited the very make of their vehicle, the sort of fine detail to which parents of seriously sick children would be oblivious. But it was parked out front, so the noticing probably meant nothing.
“No, I guess I could drive you,” Avery said. “Hold on and let me get my keys.”
“Please…?” the mother beseeched. “Could we have a glass of water for Ellie? She’s burning up.”
“Sure, no problem.” Avery hesitated; she couldn’t shut the door in their faces. “Come in for a sec. It’s freezing, and I don’t want to leave the door open.”
The family piled into the foyer. “Tanya, remember?” Clutching the child with one arm, the woman shook Avery’s hand. Freckles always made people look friendly.
The husband kept his right hand in his coat pocket and merely nodded: “Sam.” He was squarely built with Italianate good looks, but his limbs were spindly. A deferent bearing of earlier encounters replaced by a clenched rigidity, he seemed determined to get his daughter medical attention, regardless of whom he inconvenienced. “And this is Jake.” About eleven, the redhead winced into his father’s trousers. Avery recognized the jeans.
“Quite a crowd,” Tanya said, as her family huddled at the entrance to the living room.
“Nothing like losing the house where you grew up for an impromptu family reunion,” Avery said.
Tanya reached to squeeze her husband’s left hand. Willing was following the proceedings from his usual perch on the stairs. He met the eyes of the boy, who drew more tightly against his father’s leg and glared. Not a polite expression when your parents were shopping for a favor.
Once Avery returned with water, Tanya stood holding the glass as if looking for a place to put it down. Wasn’t Ellie thirsty? Avery dangled the key fob. Sam withdrew his right hand from his coat pocket and pulled out a gun.
She wondered why anyone shouted, “Freeze!” when pointing a firearm. Perfect immobility was instinctive. “That’s not necessary,” Avery said quietly. “I said I’d drive you.”
“We’re not going anywhere.” Sam leveled the handgun at her chest. “You are.”
“I don’t understand what you want,” Avery said. “What about your little girl…?”
“She’ll be fine,” Tanya said.
Avery felt like an idiot. She prided herself on having grown streetwise in the face of hardship. But underneath the broken fingernails from doing her own cleaning flitted a Washington social butterfly. In terms of her expectations of others, she still lived in a world of lunch dates, coffee klatches, and charity runs for breast cancer—a world in which the worst thing that arrived on your doorstep was a dinner party guest with an insultingly cheap bottle of red. The clincher: until not long ago, that was the same world that Sam and Tanya W-something inhabited, too. Having moved in with the wave of moneyed homebuyers that hit the neighborhood in the last decade, the desperadoes in this foyer were “gentry.”
“I’ll take that,” Sam said, reaching for the key fob.
“I thought you weren’t going anywhere,” Avery said. Willing had stood up. The bubble of conversation in the living room had died.
“You never know,” Sam said.
“Is this a robbery?” Avery used her full voice. The others needed to know what was up. “Because aside from the Jaunt, there’s not much to take here. Hinges?” she said defiantly. “We have plenty of hinges.”
“You have one big item to take,” Sam said. “Sometimes the elephant in the room is the room.”
“When you’re waving that thing around isn’t a good time to be obscure,” Avery said.
“I’ll say I’m sorry, once.” Sam panned the weapon across the living room. “In happier days, we’d have you around for a drink. But our house is in foreclosure, and we’ve been evicted. They’ve replaced the locks, set the alarm, changed the code.”
“So when the police came by to kick you out, why didn’t you shoot them?” Avery asked, glowering at the sidearm.
“Police!” Sam said. “What police? The banks all hire private security firms now. Armed to the eyeballs. Thugs.”
“What are you, then?”
“I don’t care what you call me. Because there is nothing I won’t do to put a roof over my family’s head. Your roof. I’m afraid you’re all going to have to leave.”
The room emitted a collective gasp.
“In my day,” Grand Man piped up, “any reputable American man facing ruin would shoot his own family. And then himself. Tradition was efficient. Like the self-cleaning oven.”
“See, we have elderly people here,” Avery said. “Infirm people. You can’t throw them on the street.”
“I can, and will.” The gun barrel betrayed a tremble, but it was insufficiently pronounced to guarantee that valiant funny business would succeed.
“For pity’s sake, we just lost everything!” her mother cried. “I suffer from debilitating clinical anxiety! High stress levels could bring on arrhythmia—fibrillation—hyperventilation—!”
“Mom,” Avery said quietly.
“Yeah, I’ve been diagnosed with OCD, restless leg syndrome, and an allergy to sulphites,” Sam said. “Then I got real problems. Maybe you should take the same cure.”
“This is my house,” Florence said, pulling from Esteban’s protective embrace. “We’re not renting, this is my house. By law.”
“Of which possession is nine-tenths,” Sam said.
“How do you know we don’t have guns?” Florence said furiously.
“You’re not the type,” he said.
“Honey,” Tanya said. “You weren’t the type, either.”
“I am now, baby.” The swagger was unconvincing.
“You’ll never get away with this!” Goog said hotly. “My dad’ll report you, and you’re both gonna get put away until you’re a hundred and ten!”
“Not keeping up with the news, are you, son?” Sam said wearily. “The cops have given up. Home invasions are all over town. Where do you think we got the idea?”
“Home persuasion,” Luella said, leashed to the lower banister. “Prone occasion. Peroration! Prestidigitation!” She’d once wielded an impressive vocabulary.
“But these are good people,” Kurt said over the Greek chorus. “Generous people. I’m technically a tenant, but Florence and Esteban haven’t asked for any rent in eighteen months. They’ve taken in a whole other family, an elderly relative… Florence works for a homeless shelter, for God’s sake—”
“All right, and I was a climate change modeler for the New York Academy of Sciences,” Sam snapped. “This isn’t a Sunday school contest.”
“We can see how badly you all need shelter.” Appearing to exert tremendous self-control, Florence had reverted to the methodic, nonreactive mode she must have refined at Adelphi. “Obviously, this is an emergency. So there’s no reason why we can’t make room for your family, too. We still have water, even hot water, and heating… You could all have showers. Long, relaxing showers. And you must be hungry. We don’t have much, but I’m sure I could find something for you and your children to eat. You can put down the gun. We can solve this problem together. Come to think of it, Esteban and I could give your family the whole master bedroom—”