The wooden porch needs repairing; there’s a rotting board. She’ll have it fixed next spring, she promises herself it will take at least that long to get such a thing organized. Someone has tucked a circular under her doormat: another tool sale. Tony wonders who buys all these tools—all these circular saws, cordless drills, rasps, and screwdrivers—and what they do with them really. Maybe tools are substitute weapons; maybe they’re what men go in for when they aren’t waging war. West is not the tool-using type, though: the only hammer in the house belongs to Tony, and for anything other than simple nailpounding she looks in the Yellow Pages. Why risk your life?

There’s another tool circular cluttering the tiny front lawn, which is weed-ridden and needs cutting. The lawn is a neighbourhood blot. Tony knows this, and is embarrassed by it from time to time, and vows to have the grass dug up and replaced with some colourful but hardy shrubs, or else gravel. She has never seen the point of lawns. Given the choice she’d prefer a moat, with a drawbridge, and crocodiles optional.

Charis keeps making vague mewing noises about re-doing Tony’s front lawn for her, transforming it into a miracle of bloom, but Tony has fended her off. Charis would make a garden like Tony’s study drapes, which she calls “nourishing”—rampant blossoms, twining vines, blatant seed pods—and it would be too much for Tony. She’s seen what happened to the strip of ground beside Roz’s back walk when Roz gave in to similar pleas. Because Charis has done it, Roz can’t possibly have it re-done, so now there’s a little plot of Roz’s yard that will be forever Charis.