“Dora?”

“The hospital referred her. Dora . . . Fleischer I think is her last name. I hired her to help you.” Without waiting for a response, Brian got out of the car, popped the trunk, and came around to her side and opened the door. He unfolded the walker and set it up for her. “What’s the matter? I thought you’d be pleased.”

Well, she was and she wasn’t. She was pleased to be home. But strangers were in her house. Leaving the door wide open. Tramping up and down her staircase in their work boots. Breaking apart the upstairs bedroom. Had Brian forgotten he didn’t own the house? Not yet, at least.

But Mina didn’t say anything. Just pushed against the dashboard and shifted her feet out, tried to stand, and then grudgingly took Brian’s offered hand and slid out of the car. She gritted her teeth against the pain. The doctor had said she’d feel a lot better a week from now when the swelling went down. As it was, it was slow going pushing the walker up the front walk. Brian helped her climb the front steps.

Inside, the house smelled of plaster dust and overworked electrical tools. As she shuffled across the kitchen floor, Mina felt as if her feet were leaving streaks in a coating of dust. Just as well that she couldn’t see. She’d have been desperate to clean, and until the work was done, “clean” would be an uphill battle. Besides, the doctor had said in no uncertain terms there was to be no stooping or bending, not until the physical therapist who’d be coming to the house gave her permission.

“Where are my rugs?” Mina asked as Brian helped her across the bare floor to the living room.

“Rolled up and put away,” he said. “You can bring them back when the construction is finished and you don’t need to use the walker any longer.” They’d reached her chair. He helped her turn around. She felt behind her for the seat cushion. Then, holding on to him, she lowered herself into the chair. This was going to get old fast.

Mina shivered with cold. Brian found her sweater and helped her on with it. Later, even with a mug of hot tea, the crocheted spread piled over her, and the sun shining in through the windows, Mina still felt chilled. She wished Ivory would come out of hiding.

All day long, Brian kept going upstairs to supervise, as he called it, the construction. Noise went on unabated, banging and sawing and drilling and hammering, with workers—there had to be at least three of them—marching in and out. It sounded as if they were taking the house apart. Brian explained that the banging and clattering she heard was a chute they’d set up to carry away rubble and debris. They had better not be burying her lovely lacecap hydrangeas.

She’d had to remind Brian to call and order her another pair of prescription glasses. She listened as he made the call, gave them her name and her prescription number. Of course they no longer carried anything like her old frames, but Brian said the woman he talked to on the phone had promised to do her best to come close. Fortunately, ’50s fashions were apparently back.

While Brian was on one of his supervisory forays upstairs, Mina made her way to what she was already thinking of as the “downstairs” bath. He was right. She had to leave the walker in the hall.

She washed her face. All that noise had given her a headache, and the hot washcloth felt soothing. Then she took a capsule of pain medication—Brian had filled the prescription at the hospital and the container was on the sink. She’d had a dose before breakfast in the hospital. She couldn’t read the label, but she remembered what the doctor had said: no more than once every six hours and take it with food.

In the kitchen she started to put together a light lunch for herself. But as she stood there waiting for the toast to pop, the room felt as if it was spinning. By the time Brian found her, she’d collapsed in the kitchen chair and the toast had gone cold in the toaster.

“What are you doing in here? I could have gotten you lunch. I told you, let me help you.”

He walked her into the living room and settled her in her chair again. A while later he brought her lunch on a tray. Mina had taken a few nibbles of cottage cheese on toast and a bite of what she’d thought was canned peaches but turned out to be apricots, when she started to feel warm and drowsy. The headache had gone from sharp to fuzzy.

She took a few more bites and set the tray on the table. Brian plumped a pillow behind her and, despite all the noise coming from upstairs, she nodded off.

Chapter Forty-seven

Evie had spent the rest of the afternoon sitting by her mother’s bedside talking quietly. When she ran out of things to say, she read to her mother from a copy of Tina Fey’s Bossypants, which Ginger had left. If her mother got the jokes or felt any pain, she showed no sign of it.

Now Evie backed the car into her mother’s driveway and pulled to a stop before the closed garage door. Sitting on the passenger seat were Mrs. Yetner’s glasses and a bag of takeout she’d picked up at El Coquí, a little bodega she’d passed on the way home. The rich aroma from chicken soup, a double order of sweet plantains, and garlicky black beans and rice filled the car.

She got out of the car and opened the garage, intending to pull the car in. Instead, she turned on the light and gazed around.

The kitty litter Mrs. Yetner had sprinkled on the floor was still there. Evie swept it onto a newspaper and dumped it in one of the garbage bags she’d left outside. Then she went back into the garage.

When she was growing up, her parents had kept the car parked in the driveway. The garage had been her father’s domain. Inside, it always reeked, not of gasoline but of his cigars, the ones her mother wouldn’t let him smoke in the house.

The shadowy interior seemed so much smaller without a car filling it. Without her father. At least her mother hadn’t packed the garage with garbage and debris the way she had the house.

Against the back wall was her father’s fireman’s locker—a tall, narrow wooden cabinet with FERRANTE stenciled on the front of it. His captain had let him take it home when he retired. It was one of the few things she’d really want to keep when her mother died. When her mother died. The phrase brought her up short, no longer a hypothetical.

Beside the locker stood her father’s worktable. How often she’d sat perched on the edge, watching her father sand down a tabletop or cane a chair seat. His coveted set of red metal tool drawers was tucked in the back of the garage, too. She understood now how he must have used the garage as a refuge.

But as Evie looked around she wondered what had been poured into her mother’s car’s gas tank that had been strong enough to rot it out within a few weeks. Paint stripper? Toilet cleaner? Drain cleaner? Or what about muriatic acid? She knew forgers often used that to make new metal look old, sometimes so convincingly that even experts couldn’t tell.

But nothing like any of that was lying around. Besides, the more toxic the material, the more likely that it would be sealed inside something else. Like mercury in a fluorescent bulb. Or acid in a battery.

It wasn’t until she’d backed the car into the garage and got out with Mrs. Yetner’s glasses and the take-out bag that she realized. Of course. There had been several car batteries sitting on the floor of the garage. She went to the spot alongside the car where she’d seen them. Nothing was sitting there now. But when she crouched, she could see scars in the concrete floor. She set down the take-out bag and ran her hand over them. The floor had been eaten away, right through to soil underneath.

Evie remembered her chemistry. Acid dissolved concrete. She looked closely at the shape of the deterioration. Four rectangular outlines. Each could have been the footprint of a car battery.