So that was everything I was carrying when I knelt on the rug with the pieces in my arms and my mother told me it was only a dress.
I didn't say anything to her. I couldn't. My mouth wouldn't make anything. I just knelt there with my arms full and looked at her, and she looked back at me over the top of her mug, and Hadley sat beside me with the shears in her lap, and on the TV the people with the sledgehammers broke through the wall into the next room and threw their arms up, cheering, with no sound.
That's when the front door opened behind me.
I didn't turn around. I knew who it was by the boots. Marcus wears steel-toed Red Wings that have been resoled twice, and he always stamps them on the mat twice, left and right, even in May when there's nothing on them. Stamp, stamp. Then the jingle of his keys going into the bowl on the shelf by the door. Then nothing.
Then nothing for a long time.
He'd been on a weekend crew, patching on Route 42 after a water main broke under it, and he'd told us at breakfast he'd be out till six. It was ten after three. I found out later that the asphalt plant had a breakdown and they'd sent everybody home early. That's all it was. A machine broke forty miles away and so he walked in the door at ten after three instead of six.
I heard him come across the floor and stop behind me, the way you can feel a truck stop behind you at a light. He was still in his orange vest. He smelled like hot tar.
He didn't say anything to me. He didn't say anything to Hadley. He looked at the floor, and at the shears, and at what was in my arms, and at the strips of white crepe that had come loose and were lying across the rug like streamers after a parade, and then he looked up at the couch.
"Tricia," he said.
My mother didn't answer.
"You watched her destroy it?"