Free Family Night by Maria Flook

Tracy?”
    “Of course it was Tracy, what do you think? I can’t believe this shit. On the fucking chandelier—”
    “Okay, just be calm. You don’t have to put up with this. Don’t give her a reaction.”
    Don’t have a reaction? Margaret remembered Newton’s Third Law in Physics: “For every action there’s an equal reaction.” A stationary object is struck and incorporates the offensive motion, even if it results in its own destruction. “The Conservation of Momentum.” In its neutrality, its passivity, it shatters, thus it
moves
. Sometimes, under a barrage of gunfire, a person is lifted off the ground, suspended, flung.
    “I was sort of looking forward to seeing Elizabeth, really.” Margaret cleared her throat. She worried she was becoming tearful.
    “Come on, it’s okay,” Cam told her. “It’s just the same horseshit. She gets the bumper stickers at the church bazaar.”
    “What’s that smell? God, she’s making ratatouille. She knows I love it.” The air was rich with the fragrance of olive oil and eggplant. And rising through that heavy scent, Margaret could detect a familiar breath of Estée Lauder. “She’s making that dish for me,” she told Cam. “Christ. These mixed messages.”
    “Just because she’s stewing some eggplant, don’t go soft on her.”
    They heard Elizabeth coming down the hall; the light click of her pumps on the terrazzo tiles was unmistakable.
    “Have you finally decided to arrive?” Elizabeth called. She appeared in the archway between the living room and the dining room. She stood there, centered, her hair gleaming in great cinnabar waves. “Margaret,” she said. “I was certain you stayed on the train and went to Florida.”
    “I’m sorry, we’ve been playing hooky. Cam had to clean the pool at the apartments.”
    “Did you see the industrial park?” Elizabeth asked her.
    “It’s terrible,” Margaret said.
    “I hear the bulldozers all day; they make a constant
beep, beep, beep
when they back up. It’s torture.”
    “Those are warnings. Saves lives,” Cam said.
    “Oh really? Well, it saves some lives and ruins others,” Elizabeth said.
    “Is that ratatouille?” Margaret said.
    “Fresh eggplants. You should see them, tiny as thumbs.”
    “Thumbs struck by hammers,” Cam said.
    Elizabeth said, “He’s in one of his moods.” Margaret nodded.
    They stood around the big mahogany table. The magazine scrap twirled slowly in the air, its jellied skull, its rooster-comb hands extended in a frozen greeting.
II
    Cam said he had to be back at the Bringhurst Apartments to show a two-bedroom at four o’clock. He would get Laurence from Darcy and come back for dinner. Margaret walked him to his car.
    “Sorry about that embryo,” Cam said.
    “I used to hang things from the ceiling for Celeste, rabbits and stars; the stars absorbed the daylight and glowed in the dark.”
    “Sure, I know.”
    “I took those things down when I read a baby was strangled in his own mobile.”
    “How often can that happen?”
    “It happens.”
    Cam backed his car out of the driveway, and then he was gone behind the hemlocks.
    Margaret went back into the house to get freshened up, and she saw that her old bedroom had been claimed by her father. His big desk looked wild; every drawer was fully extended until she believed the whole piece would topple if not for a heavy canister of pennies he kept on a top ledge. On the floor, his ledgers and tomes were stacked in waist-high, tilting towers. She lifted a tall spindle, leafy with receipts, and found an old storybook. Its spine was cracked and the book fell open in the middle. Once, she had tried to read a favorite passage to Cam, but he wasn’t impressed. He was pitching a sock into the air and catching it on his pointerfinger. He was trying to distract her when she was feeling bookish. Then, some hormonal message caused the capillaries in her nostril to rupture. A sudden, red spill forced Cam to look down at the page. He