Moments after the blast, she could tell that someone inside the trailer was yelling. She glimpsed the movement through the window, then an older woman opened the door, still in her nightgown. She was yelling back at someone inside.

"Are you all right, ma'am?" Gerry asked.

The woman had two strands of grey hair falling down on either side of her face, which was flushed. She had hazel eyes and a gap in her lower teeth that kept flashing as she spoke. Gerry had to urge her to slow down so she could understand.

"I'm fine," the woman said, more slowly. "Fine. It's my son who's upset."

A half-dressed man flashed by the doorway behind her.

"What happened?" Gerry said.

"Nothing," the woman said. "I saw a cockroach in the sink. A couple of—" The woman turned away inside and was yelling fast again, so Gerry lost what she said. There was smoke lifting off the tops of the windows.

"I got a call that you wanted to change a lock," Gerry said.

"No point in that now, we got no windows," the woman said. "I'm sorry. I eff-ed up."

The man appeared again, this time in a pea-green Virginia Tech sweatshirt. "I'm sorry about this," he said. "My mother just set off a fist full of bug bombs in the kitchen. I think the stove blew 'em up." 

Gerry asked him to say it again, to make sure she got it right. He wasn't bad-looking—his eyes were almost silver, and from his neck and arms he looked like he'd been a high school athlete, back before he'd gained a few pounds and his hair had gone pepper-and-salt.

"Bug bombs," he repeated, slow. "She's nuts." He looked wrung out.

"Sorry to hear it," Gerry said. "About the bugs, I mean." She saw the trailer's front wall had bowed out from the blast. At the bottom it sagged like a stack of slick magazines.

"She sees one bug, they all gotta die," the man said. He stuck out his hand.  "My name's Ray."

"Mine's Gerry." She pointed to the name tag on her uniform.