She wanted to go see him, but even with the toothpaste she knew she still smelled like throw-up. While he was making coffee, she heard her mother come down the stairs and go into the kitchen. They must’ve hugged and kissed at first because there weren’t any words for a good two or three minutes. Then came the doozies. Her father was going on and on describing this liquor store that got looted while its roof was on fire. This Negro kid, whom Chick had just given a manifesto, rolled it up, put it in his back pocket, then ran into the store through its missing front window. He came out carrying a case of wine. The back of his T-shirt was smoking and the pamphlet burned like a candle in his back pocket.

“And that’s about how it went, Tess,” he went on. “They weren’t even looking inside them. Even when I read it through a megaphone in the street, they sort of plowed by us on the way to the loot. Yesterday Big Toby got his tooth knocked out with a brick. They looked at us like we were either the enemy or a sideshow. We stayed clear of the law though, hon’. We parked under an overpass and slept in the wagon Friday and Saturday night. Last night we climbed a tenement and threw the manifestos off the roof. We planted the seed, Tess. That’s all we can do. The South will be easier, you watch. They’re already organized down there, they’re ready–”

“We’re not going.”

Wow. Allie sat straight up at what her mother just said.

“What did you say?”

“I noticed something this weekend, Chick. You didn’t call home once. Not once.”

“Who’s not going?”

“Your wife and children, mister. That’s who.”

Allie heard two steps, the slap of something hard hitting something soft, then her father yelling louder than she’d ever heard him, “You’ll goddamn go where the hell I tell you and that’s fucking that! Do you hear me?! Do you fucking hear?!”

Then her mother was screaming back all kinds of things like what a pathetic man Chick Donovan was, what a fascist bully phony shit of a man—You’re so fucking impressionable! You are a child, and I am sick to death of being your mother!!”

One of them walked right out the back door, then outside and off the porch. Allie knew it was her dad because her mom started to cry in the kitchen, the same kind of weepy sighs building to gasps she let out when they made love. Christopher was bawling in his room next to Allie’s, and she thought about going to calm him down but didn’t move.