The house’s stone foundation rises three feet above grade. The wooden walls of the house were built on top of that, but not actually attached to it (a common practice in the old days, which, at the time he blew town, was on Randy’s list of things to fix before the next earthquake). When the earth began to oscillate side-to-side at 2:16 in the afternoon yesterday, the foundation oscillated right along with it, but the house wanted to stay where it was. Eventually the foundation wall moved right out from underneath the house, one corner of which dropped three feet to the ground. Randy could probably estimate the amount of kinetic energy the house picked up during this fall, and convert it to an equivalent in pounds of dynamite or swings of a wrecking ball, but it would be a nerdy exercise, since he can see the effects for himself. Let’s just say that when it smashed to earth the whole structure suffered a vicious shock. The parallel, upright joists in the floors all went horizontal, collapsing like dominoes. Every window and doorframe instantly became a parallelogram, so all of the glass broke, and in particular all of the leaded glass was rent asunder. The stairway fell into the basement. The chimney, which had been in need of tuck-pointing for some time, sprayed bricks all over the yard. Most of the plumbing was wrecked, which means that the heating system is history, since the house used radiators. The plaster fell from the lath everywhere, cumulative tons of old horse-hair plaster just exploding out of the walls and ceilings and mixing with the water from the busted plumbing to make a grey slurry that congealed in the downhill corners of the rooms. The hand-crafted Italian tiles that Charlene picked out for the bathrooms are seventy-five percent broken. The granite counters in the kitchen are now seamed tectonic systems. A few of the major appliances look repairable, but ownership of those was in dispute anyway.