“Drywood termites,” he said, drolly. “Looks like they’ve been set up here forever. They’re way down at the eaves.”

“Termites?” Mrs. Park covered her mouth, nausea rising.

“I can point ’em out with my flashlight if you want to climb up here.”

“No, no,” Mrs. Park said.

Mira interpreted: “We’ll take your word for it.”

“You ladies are real trusting.” The termite man climbed slowly out of the hole, grunting as he lowered himself down the ladder. “You’re lucky you’re dealing with me. I’ve been in this business twenty years. There’s all these fly-by-night guys out there now who’ll tell ya you need to fumigate the whole place when all they’ve found’s a fly.”

Mrs. Park tapped Mira on the shoulder again, and again mimed drinking.

“Now, is she calling me a drunk?” the termite man asked. “Just kidding. I’m fine for water.”

He put on a jumpsuit and over the next hour or so, poked inside the basement, inspected the garage, and scraped and tugged at the unloved toolshed in the yard. Besides termites, wasps and the endless stacks of old newspapers in the basement—“Tell your mom she really needs to move them, it’s an inferno waiting to happen down there!”—he found five rodent carcasses in the crawl space under the front porch, likely the forgotten treasures of some absentminded mutt.

After everything, they stood on the porch for the debriefing. The termite man’s jumpsuit had him looking like a break-dancer who’d just moonwalked through a sandstorm. He marked up a floor plan he’d drawn on the spot, labeling the areas where he’d found undesirables. There were ten spots, including an entire wall of the garage that was home to a colony of subterranean termites.

“I have to recommend you let us tent the house and the garage.”

“What do you mean, tent?” Mira spoke for her mother, who looked confused.

“We’ll cover the house up like a circus tent and pump it full of Vikane, which is a colorless, odorless poison that only trusted companies like ours are authorized to use. It’ll blast to hell every lil’ sucker living in this structure.”

“So you can’t just go in there and scoop them out?”

“Well, no. Termites live deep underground. You got to think of them as Al Qaeda sleeper cells, know what I mean? They’re just sitting there quietly, then one day you wake up and find your whole house collapsed on top of you.” He folded his arms gravely. “What you want to do is introduce poison into the bowels of the house, using those tunnels that they’ve dug. You can kill as many termites as you want but it ain’t over till you get down to the queen. And I know the analogy’s a little corny but you have to think of the queen as the Osama bin Laden of termites.”