"Look at that. She went right around me. She went right around you, too, Mare, look, you're fine, you're on the stairs. She didn't touch the front room. She didn't touch the porch." She was talking slowly, half to herself, the way she talks when she's doing the crossword. "If you wanted to wreck your sister's picture, if you were just mad, you'd go for the middle. You'd just go at it. You'd go for her, for Maren, for the thing she made. You don't take a putty knife and scrape off a whole roof one row at a time. That takes a long time, a roof. That takes—" she looked at the clock, "—that takes a while." She tilted her head again. "You went for the roof. And you went for yourself."
"I hate that picture," Krista said from the stairs. Her voice sounded strange. "I told Maren. I hate it, I was sick of hearing about it, I did it, that's all, you can ground me, I'm nineteen, ground me, take my phone—"
My mother wasn't listening to her. My mother had crouched down, slowly, holding onto the edge of the table, with her bad knees cracking like kindling, and she was looking at the pile I'd made on the floor. The wet pile of shingles. She picked one up.
I remember being glad, for a second. I remember a big warm stupid wave of being glad, because I thought she was trying to save them. I thought she was picking up the pieces of my picture the way I had been picking them up, to see if anything could be done, and I thought that meant she was on my side, and I almost started crying for the first time all night, right there, because of how glad I was.
She held the shingle up to the light from the ceiling fixture. It was one of the ones that had gone down face-up. A little dark red rectangle, curled from the water, about the size of a postage stamp, with a few words of white type on it. She held it very close to her face. She read it.
Then she put it down on the dining room table, by itself, and picked up another one.
She read that one too. She put it down next to the first one.
"Mom," I said. "What are you doing."
She didn't answer. She picked up another, and another. Her hands were moving faster now. She wasn't looking at the board anymore and she wasn't looking at either of us. She was sitting on the floor now, on the linoleum, in the wet, in her uniform pants, and she was going through the pile of shingles one at a time and sorting them onto the edge of the table above her head, into little rows, the way she sorts mail into the case at the station every morning. I've seen her do it. I went to work with her once, on a Take Your Child to Work Day when I was nine, and stood behind her at the case at five-forty in the morning while she sorted the letters for Route 19 into the little wooden slots, a slot for every address, and her hands were so fast I couldn't see them, flick, flick, flick, the letters going into the slots like she was dealing cards. She didn't even look. She knew where every one went before she picked it up.