There Was an Old Woman

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.