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the street. While we were parked, big yellow sawhorses had been put up at both ends, closing off access. The wooden crate still sat in the truck’s cargo compartment rear, looking oddly familiar; where had I seen one like it before? Also, the plate glass windows of the storefronts all had paper tape plastered across them, as if . . .
    Something
ping
ed in my memory. The Top Cat crew backed away from the truck. The net was good. I understood the net. But . . .
    “I say, let ’em come,” said Purlie, who had been in charge of blasting at the gravel pit. “Make the durn video, spend their money, give us all a boost and may the devil take the . . .”
    Down the street, a Top Cat crew member produced a handheld radio controller. With a flourish he pressed a button on the device. And as he did so, my memory produced the following information:
    The button closed a circuit inside the radio controller, and sent a signal to a receiver in the crate in the cargo compartment. The receiver closed its own circuit, whereupon a battery in the crate began producing electrical current. The current jumped a gap, creating a spark that fired a blasting cap lodged in a larger amount of less volatile, more powerful material. This sequence of events is called “lighting the candle.”
    With a bright white flash and a concussive
boom!
the truck’s cargo compartment exploded. The net over it billowed briefly as if inflated, then collapsed.
    “. . . hindmost,” ex-gravel-pit-blasting boss Purlie Wadsworth finished, not turning a hair.
    Me, either.
     
     
    “How could you just sit there?” Ellie demanded moments after the blast. “You didn’t even flinch.”
    Kids raised in mining towns think explosions are the sound of food falling onto the table and school clothes showing up in their closets.
    “Ellie, when they weren’t digging coal my uncles blew up stumps with black powder and fertilizer from the feed store. One of my cousins set off a charge in the privy behind the parsonage. When the smoke cleared he’d demolished the whole church.”
    Actually I had even more history with explosives than that: the fact was, my mother’s family romance with anything that could be made to explode was what got my father interested in her in the first place.
    But now wasn’t the time to talk about it. Instead we drove to Harriet’s past the redbrick Frontier Bank building, the Happy Landings Café with its colored umbrellas out on the deck, and the Motel East perched on a bluff overlooking the water. Beyond the motel you could see all the way down the bay, to the bridge over the channel to Canada. Out past the span the fog lay on the water like a strip of grey wool, the first sign of changing weather.
    “Well, I don’t care how used to it you are,” Ellie complained, which was unlike her. But it
had
been a big explosion; my ears were jangly again. “That thing nearly scared my heart out of my throat.”
    Actually, no time was the time to talk about it. We drove up Shackford Street between front lawns studded with snowdrops and grape hyacinth. The lilac leaves were out but their blooms were still purple-grey nubbins as tight as tiny fists.
    “They netted it to keep stuff from flying around and hurting someone,” I told her. “Reinforced the cargo box, too, by the looks of it afterwards.” Remarkably, the truck had appeared undamaged.
    “All they want from a blast like that is the flash. It was a fine job,” I concluded, “of keeping everything contained.”
    The music video was called
Shake It Till You Break It,
and even before witnessing the blast I’d worried that’s what it might do to us. But these guys were good: their competence—I thought at the time—a favorable sign.
    Ellie harrumphed as she pulled the car over and we climbed out. Harriet Hollingsworth’s house looked even sadder and shabbier in close-up than it had at a distance. And there was something new about it, something different I couldn’t quite put my finger