Relentless

coasting toward the curb.
    Since exiting the garage, I searched the day, expecting to see Waxxeither in a parked car or standing at some vantage point along the street. He seemed to have decided against a ringside seat.
    Penny looked at me. I nodded. She used the remaining momentum of the vehicle to turn crosswise in the street, where she came to a stop, angled back the way we had come.
    A kind of masochistic need to know enraptured us.
    Through the windshield, we had a view of the first house we ever owned. Slate roof. Stacked-stone and stucco walls. Imposing but not pretentious lines. Welcoming.
    With us in residence, that house had known much laughter and love. Milo had been conceived there, and within those walls we had transformed ourselves from a couple into a family, which more than anything had been what Penny and I wanted; still wanted; would always want.
    The first blast shook the street, rocked the Explorer, and fissured one corner of our house, casting off slate shingles, slabs of plaster, and a bright rain of shattered upstairs windowpanes.
    Even as the shingles, the shed stucco, and the shards of glass became airborne, the second blast shuddered the entire structure, blew out first-floor windows, toppled a stone chimney toward the backyard, and distorted the shape of the garage.
    Within me, distortions occurred as well: to my perception of my place in the world, to my expectations of social order and simple justice, to my vision of the future.
    A third explosion followed in maybe three seconds, not as loud and sharp as the first two but even more profoundly destructive: a heavy
whump
, as if Satan had fired up a burner on the biggest gas stove in Hell. The house seemed to swell, then twist, then shrink, and in an instant was engulfed in flames from end to end, flames more blue than yellow, not orange at all, seething and insatiable, leaping eagerly to the forty-foot-wide crowns of the matched phoenix palms.
    Before neighbors rushed into the street, Penny wheeled from the burning house and drove away.
    I saw tears standing unshed in her eyes, and I could have cried or cursed, but I kept my silence as she kept hers.
    We had gone perhaps a block when in my arms Milo said shakily, “We didn’t blow up our house, did we?”
    “No, we didn’t,” I said.
    “Who blew it up?” he asked.
    Penny said, “A man I want to have a talk with someday.”
    “A very bad man,” I added.
    “I think I know him,” said Milo.
    “I think you do.”
    “I really liked our house,” Milo said. “Now all our stuff is burned up.”
    “Not all of it,” I said. “We seem to have like three tons of it here in the Explorer.”
    “A house is just a house,” Penny said. “Stuff is just stuff. All that matters is the three of us are together.”
    In the backseat, Lassie growled.
    “The four of us,” Penny corrected. “The four of us are nicer, smarter, and tougher than Shearman Waxx. We’ll settle this, we’ll set things right again.”
    That we were nicer than Waxx, not even Waxx himself would have denied. He did not seem to value niceness.
    With Milo on our side, we were more intelligent than the critic, although not more cunning. Like Mozart, Einstein, and other brainiacs, Milo had every kind of smarts in abundance, except for the one most important in this instance: street smarts.
    I did not have a clue why Penny thought we were
tougher
than Waxx. Because she did not say such things lightly, I credited the possibility that, in us, Waxx had met his match, as absurd as that concept might appear to be.
    Of course, she didn’t have all the information that I possessed. Events had unfolded so quickly that I’d had no opportunity to tell her about John Clitherow.
    As I watched her repress her tears and find a reassuring smile for Milo, I dreaded having to tell her about John’s murdered family. But I had only twice ever deceived her by omission, and the second time— withholding the fact that Waxx would be at lunch at Roxie’s when I took Milo there—had been a mistake of epic proportions.
    In 1933, G. K. Chesterton wrote, “The disintegration of rational society started in the drift from hearth and family; the solution must be a drift back.”
    I had a disturbing feeling that getting back to where we had been would require more than drifting. We would need to swim with all the strength and perseverance we possessed, and the journey was likely to be upstream all the way.

I Am My Brothers’ Reaper

   Even