Hardware

They tried to drag Aunt Phil from the street.

It shouldn't have been that hard.

To begin with she isn't too big.

Five foot four to be exact.

She isn't that young either.

Fifty-three as of last Tuesday.

But she was angry and she had a hammer.

The brand she'd just put on sale for $9.99. And she was raising that tool, spitting fury at a huge hole in the ground one block long; shrieking at a four-story gargantuan plastic Waldo head that was being erected right before her eyes.

Cali tried gently but firmly to get her inside, but there's just so much a teenager can do against an aunt with a hammer.

Lewis, Cali's half cousin, tried to help, but he always made things worse. "Everyone's looking at you, Phil. You want them to think you're crazy?"

Aunt Phil turned to him with half-crazy eyes. "The world's gone mad, Mr. Insight. Not me." She looked at Cali. "Am I right?"

Cali half squirmed. "Sort of, Aunt Phil. You're sort of right."

Aunt Phil had always been a fighter.

When the mayor had proposed a zoning tax on small businesses, Aunt Phil took to the streets, screaming that small business owners were going to fight back and defend their stores "with our bare feet if necessary."

"That's bare hands, Aunt Phil," Cali had whispered.

"Whatever." Phil stood tough.

When two shoplifters tried to rob her store blind, Phil cornered them with her turbocharged staple gun.

"Drop the merchandise, scumbags, or I'll staple your nostrils together."

Big Mel, Cali's partial uncle, called the police, who hauled those terrified thieves off to jail.

"You plot against the innocent, you pay!" Phil screamed, waving her staple gun.

"You're not innocent, lady!" one of the robbers shouted back.

But as Big Mel always said, "You never know what's going to make the glass run over. You never know what's going to split the last straw down the backside."

And what it was for Aunt Phil and Cali's family and Phil's Hardware Store and all the little family-run stores on Lattice Avenue was Waldo's SuperStore moving in across the street. One block long.

They had everything.

Groceries.

Hardware.

Paint.

Clothes.

Whatever a human being needed, Waldo's had it.

At discount prices.

No small store could survive when a Waldo's came to town.

Aunt Phil raised an angry fist at the Waldo's truck as it rumbled by.

"You think you can just move in here with your big muck trucks and tear out my heart in public? You think God is not going to judge you for putting up your establishment right across from where my father, may God rest his soul, built this store brick by brick by the sweat of his person?"

Cali cleared her throat to keep Phil honest. The store wasn't made of brick and Aunt Phil's father, Andrew, who was Cali's great-uncle, paid his sister's second husband, Wilfred, to build it.

"This is sacred ground, you morons!"

Store owners on Lattice Avenue were coming outside to see what all the racket was about.

Lester Malloy from Lester's Grill.

Mrs. Caselli from the bakery.

Mr. and Mrs. Toole from AAA Extermination and their no-good son, Weston.

They stood there and let her rail, like a family with a crazy relative who no one can keep quiet.

When you've been through what these store owners had been through, everyone on the street was like family.

Weston scratched his stomach and half leered at Cali. Cali always suspected that AAA Extermination's key weapon against rats was Weston. One look at Weston and any self-respecting rat would run for cover.

Phil put her hammer down. A good sign.

Lewis moved closer. Gently picked up the hammer.

Aunt Phil let Cali guide her inside. When a person has spent thirty minutes screaming at morons, it takes a lot out of you.

Big Mel had finished four glazed doughnuts, almost without chewing. He sloshed the coffee in his mug, took a slurp, and said, "Look, we can't fight it. Waldo's has offered us not much to sell the store, but it's either that or die, slowly bleeding in the street."

Big Mel was Aunt Phil's half brother.

Most relationships in Cali's family were explained by fractions.

"I don't bleed in public," Phil announced, whose role in the family was to dispute whatever Big Mel said.

"We're not going to get anywhere this way," Cali's mother said. Cali's mother's role in the family was to try to help people be reasonable. It was a lonely job.

"He's happy to sell out to pirates!" Aunt Phil screamed.

"Pirates don't give you money," Big Mel shouted back. "They steal."

Aunt Phil said that was her point exactly.

Cali was standing back from the kitchen table as she always did when the family had a meeting. She tried to be like her mother -- look at both sides. But these sides were too different. Her whole family was different. She was most like her mother, but she didn't have the patience. She wasn't anything like Phil -- no one was -- she and Lewis were from different planets. And Big Mel was sick of the store, sick of hardware, and just wanted to sell, get out, and move to Boise.

"Okay . . ." Her mom took out a legal pad and started making a list. Making lists made Phil nuts because she never agreed with what got on the list. Big Mel didn't like lists someone else made.

"So how come you're so all-fired sure we've got to sell?" Phil shouted at Mel."Because I worked it out."

"Where?" Phil already knew the answer.

Big Mel pointed to his big head. "Here."

"And because of what's in your empty head, you want me to hand over the legacy of my father and his father before him, who had to flee from Cossacks to give us this home in a free land?"

Big Mel ate another doughnut. "They got on a boat from Ireland, Phil. There are no Cossacks in Ireland."

"Cossacks are everywhere," Phil growled and turned to Cali, who refused to make eye contact.

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Excerpted from Necessary Noise: Stories about Our Families as They Really Are
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.