Read Tinderbox for Free Online Page B

me. I thought I’d stop by and see how you
     and Eva are doing.”
    Ten minutes later, she climbs the steps to the brownstone. Two urns overflowing with
     verbena and hollyhocks flank the door. She rings the bell, and then uses her key to
     let herself in.
    Her mother and Eva are at the farm table that separates the kitchen and parlor. Through
     the doors opening onto the dining deck, Caro can see the mugs left on the outdoor
     table. The canvas umbrella is open, casting shade over the terra-cotta pots. Below,
     in the garden, a path leads from the shaded lower deck to a fountain installed the
     year Adam left for college, if his at best partial residence in his N.Y.U. dorm can
     be called leaving, by her mother’s first lover, a photographer with a penchant for
     tinkering that resulted in a hidden pump that makes the water gurgle over a tiny wheel.
     Beyond the fountain and the brick-edged beds of plantings—low pachysandra, bushy oat
     grass, miscanthus interspersed with daylilies and purple irises—is the huppah under
     which Adam and Rachida were married seven years ago, Omar’s presence in Rachida’s
     belly obvious to all. The huppah is home now to a hammock, installed by her mother’s
     last lover, an itinerant lecturer of mathematics whose jealous scenes had led to what
     her mother has told her was a decision that “last” means not latest but final, a final
     she now views in the context of her teleology of love as progress rather than retreat.
    “Hello, darling,” Myra says. “We’re just working out a schedule for Eva, first for
     the next two weeks before the others arrive, and then for after that. Come take a
     look and see if we’ve forgotten anything.”
    Caro pulls up a chair and pours herself a glass of lemon water from the pitcher on
     the table. Although she and everyone else admire her mother’s keen organizational
     skills, applied these days primarily to herself and her own pursuits, they also provoke
     in Caro a kind of dread, a silent rebelliousness, as though she is being asked to
     conform to a grim military regime. When she once confessed this to her mother, her
     mother said, “I’m so sorry. How awful for you. You need to remember that I’m only
     trying to control myself. An orderly external life allows my mind to wander freely.
     It’s an occupational hazard for therapists. We overvalue order, since it’s the unchanging
     routine of the sessions that lets the unconscious flow.”
    Her mother’s love of order, Caro has come to understand, runs even deeper. For her
     mother, there is a harmonic beauty in a household where the precise number of cartons
     of milk needed for a week are loaded face forward on the bottom refrigerator shelf
     every Wednesday afternoon, where each closet has its designated function, where the
     mattresses are turned left to right, top to bottom, in alternating seasons. Unlike
     Caro, her mother eats the foods her body needs at the times they are needed. Her days
     are laid out so that each includes fresh air, work, solitude, conversation, and time
     at her piano. They are works of art unto themselves, something that fills Caro alternately
     with awe and horror—awe because her mother, in fact, accomplishes more in a day than
     anyone else she knows, horror because it seems inhuman to be able to keep destructive
     impulses so entirely leashed.
    Caro studies the first column of the schedule her mother has drawn up for Eva. It
     is labeled Daily Tasks : Mondays for laundry, Tuesdays for washing linens and ironing, Wednesdays for cleaning
     the baths and kitchen, Thursdays for vacuuming and dusting, Fridays for food shopping
     and errands. She skips to the column labeled Omar School Pickup . Caro had leaned on all her connections to find a first-grade spot for Omar, with
     a friend in the admissions office at the City School having come through only last
     week thanks to a family that was unexpectedly moving. On the schedule, there is Adam
     for