Friendswood Read Free Page A

artificial goldfish. Unbelievable. He didn’t even have a permit yet, and the land had already been surveyed. Taft claimed that this area didn’t have the same limitations as the land beneath Rosemont, but even Lee knew that soil fifty feet underground had subterranean movement. The chemicals could still leach to the surface over here.
    She pulled out the jars and the shovel from her bag, bent down, cleared a section of weeds away, dug a shallow hole, and filled the jar with soil. Twenty feet in the other direction, she bent down, dug a hole about eight inches deep, and filled another jar. The mud was deeper in parts of this section, and some of the survey stakes had toppled. She went on working, all around her the wet, dead grass, the chaotic bushes, the past pressing down from the sky.
    There was a voice she heard in her head, sometimes with Jack’s intonations, sometimes with Jess’s. “Time to leave.” She wanted to get a sample near a bald spot in the middle of the gray weeds. A wasp droned close to her, and she flung her hand to hit it away, but it got close to her face, buzzed against her cheek, then looped and stitched back. Wincing, she flicked her hand again and stumbled. The wasp flew off.
    Then she saw the thing about twenty yards away, as big as the bed of a pickup truck. The gray corner angled up from the mud beneath a sick-looking sapling. Was it some lost bit of cement? She went closer, herboots smacking in the muck as the dull shape clarified itself. One flat side of it had wrestled up into the air, the other side still sunk into the ground. A giant, filthy, gray vinyl box. The top of it was charred with a bright pink and brown stain, and a crack jiggered its way down the middle, where a copper liquid leaked out in a thin, jagged stream. Her heart punched in her chest. Back in January, Professor Samuels had said this could happen, though it had seemed so unlikely then. “You get enough rain, it shifts the water table—it can pop a container right up.”
    And there it was. For years, the container had been safe down there, but now the land had excreted it, the way coffins sometimes came back up in a flood. Her head filled with pressure. In the distance, the pine trees seemed to lean forward. She smelled something acidic and bitter, benzene fumes or worse, and covered her nose and mouth with one hand as she took the camera from her bag with the other. The light was already going, but she’d get the picture somehow. She pressed the button to open the lens.
    This was the thing she’d been waiting for, but didn’t know how to name, the thing that would redeem her. Over the woods, the sun, a bright orange candy set on fire, dangled. She snapped the photographs. The dog barked again. She took twenty-two pictures of the upturned container. Then she ran.

HAL

    H AL DID BETTER with the husbands on closing sales—he tried to catch the eye of Mr. Coller, who kept looking away. “I don’t know,” said his wiry wife, as they rounded the corner to the kitchen, new, pristine cabinets gleaming like wet Wite-Out over the dingy ones that had been there before. “I’m just not feeling enough space on this side of the house, enough air.” She fluttered her hand toward the living room off the kitchen, which Hal admitted was smaller than most, but recently tiled and sunny, a room that carried cleanness and possibility like a new prayer.
    That was when Hal officially gave up.
    Finally, he’d been able to start showing houses again after the storm, but only those on this side of town, where there hadn’t been flooding. For the moment, there were goddamn few houses to list, and now he also had to battle Mrs. Coller’s vague feng shui
ideas. He could never tell if that nonsense would work for a sale or against it. Another woman had remarked on this very house that the energy was just right, that the doors opened exactly where they were supposed to