And behind her, on the other side of our fence, in the corner of the Gateway Green where the bluegrass met our gravel, a young man in a sweat-stained landscaping company T-shirt was standing knee-deep in a fresh trench, holding a spade and looking at the house the way a deer looks at headlights. He had seen me in the window. Georgine hadn't, yet.
I stood there for a second longer than I should have. I want to say I was angry right away, and I was, but the first thing I actually felt was a kind of disbelief so complete that it was almost calm. It was the feeling you get when you walk into your kitchen and find the refrigerator sitting in the middle of the floor. It's not that you can't see it. It's that you can't make it mean anything.
Then I looked down the hall at my daughter, sitting on the bathroom floor with a towel on her head and her neck the color of a boiled shrimp, and it started meaning something.
"Stay here," I said. "Put some clothes on. Don't come outside."
"Dad?"
"Stay inside, Pia."
I put on my shoes. I remember that, because I remember thinking I should put on shoes, and being proud of myself for thinking it, and then going out the front door in a pair of gym shorts and a Colorado Rockies T-shirt with a hole in the armpit, with my hands still wet and smelling faintly of ammonia.