Free Until She Comes Home by Lori Roy Page B

she was going to tend to the things that needed tending. Now she’ll hurry up about it before Mr. Herze comes home. From the bottom of the handbag, she pulls out the hammer she purchased from Simpson’s Hardware earlier in the day to replace the one she dropped down on Willingham.
    Making her way across the driveway and toward Mr. Herze’s garage, Malina holds the hammer with both hands, and as she walks she tests the weight and feel of it. Much like the other hammer, as best she can remember. At the sound of a car engine, she stops and listens, but the engine continues on past her house and fades as the car drives down Alder. Not Mr. Herze. If she had the time, Malina would count to twenty to try to slow her heart and quiet the tension that has settled in her neck and shoulders. The nerves have traveled as far as her stomach tonight, and she might need to chew a sliver of ginger root before slipping into bed. Dr. Cannon says there’s always time for a few deep breaths, but he’s wrong. There’s never time for counting and breathing when a lady is truly in need.
    Inside the garage, Malina tiptoes through the boxes and bags scattered about the floor, all of them donations for the thrift store that the other ladies have dropped off with her to be sorted and delivered, and once she reaches the center of the room, she stretches overhead and tugs on a small chain. She squints in the sudden brightness. The breeze that followed her through the door stirs up the single bulb that dangles from the ceiling and light rolls around the small room, aggravating her already-queasy stomach. The thin silver chain swings from side to side and eventually hangs motionless.
    There is always a certain smell in the garage, like sawdust, though Mr. Herze rarely runs a saw, particularly in the summer. He prefers to tackle his projects in the autumn and early spring. But some odors are like that—always sticking to things and making a nuisance of themselves no matter how many weeks or months have passed.
    In Malina’s hand, this new hammer’s wooden handle is smooth. She can’t remember if the other one, the one she dropped in that dark alley, was also smooth. And wasn’t the other handle red? But the hardware store hadn’t had a red-handled hammer. Only this brown-handled one. It isn’t as if she regularly touches Mr. Herze’s tools, but she is quite certain the head of the hammer she carried down the factory’s alley was forked on one side. She is quite certain of that. How much more could matter about a hammer?
    Edging toward the wooden slab that Mr. Herze uses as a work surface for his gluing and sanding, Malina reaches out with both hands and gently lays the new hammer in two metal hooks hanging from a pegboard. The board is a result of careless neighbors. So many times Mr. Herze has loaned out a tool only to find it missing when he later discovered a need for it. By that time, he often forgot to whom he had loaned the tool. Now, with one glance at the black outlines on his pegboard, he can know which tool is not in its proper place and he no longer forgets. The rest of his equipment—fishing rods, a shotgun handed down from his father, a black pistol, filet knives, and an ax or two are locked up in a cabinet alongside the pegboard because Mr. Herze must worry the neighbors will make off with those things too. Oddly, not as many neighbors ask to borrow tools anymore.
    The night she took the hammer and dropped it in her handbag, she had briefly, only for a moment, considered unlocking the cabinet and taking the black pistol for her protection. A gun, however, would require a certain degree of skill, and she didn’t begin to know about bullets and triggers and such. Mr. Herze once mentioned he kept the weapon loaded. In an emergency, a man wouldn’t want to be fooling around with boxes of ammunition that might spill or, worse yet, be misplaced. But Malina had no way of knowing for sure if it was loaded or not, so she had settled on