The Town (30 page)

Almost.

But her reluctance to speak of the events in Russiantown was stronger than her desire to break free of that reluctance, and she kept quiet, not knowing whether it really was her own decision or one that had been imposed upon her.

They stepped into the antique store and spent about twenty minutes looking through everything. Deanna bought a pink dogwood plate and a Homer Laughlin gravy boat from the old lady behind the counter.

The two of them walked up the sidewalk, past Dale’s Heating and Plumbing, and stopped in at the used bookstore, where Deanna bought an old Phillip Emmons novel and Julia picked up a Paul Prudhomme cookbook. By the time they finished, it was almost time for school to get out, and Julia had her friend drive her home so she could be there when Adam and Teo arrived.

“What are your plans for tomorrow?” Deanna asked.

Julia smiled guiltily. “I really should get back to work on my book,” she said.

Deanna laughed. “Too much playing lately, huh? The old work ethic kicking your brain in the butt?”

“Yeah. Something like that.”

“Have fun, then. I’ll call you Thursday. Maybe we can go out for lunch.”

Julia nodded. “Sounds good.”

She waved as her friend drove back up the drive, then stepped inside the house.

Gregory’s mother was home, taking a nap in her room. With some quiet time at her disposal, Julia did break out her notebook and spent a good half hour writing a possible ending for her children’s book before Adam and Teo got home.

And she didn’t think of scary things once.

 

They ate dinner together that night, all of them. It was the first time in a while that the six of them had been seated around the dining table at the same time. Usually Adam and Teo were hungry and Gregory was late, so she fed the kids first and saved their own dinner for later.

Or Sasha was off with her friends, eating at the diner.

Or Adam was over at Scott’s house.

But today they were all here. She wished she could have known ahead of time because all they were having was leftover borscht. She would have made something better, something special, had she known.

She was acutely conscious of how awkward they all seemed with one another, how stilted and uncharacteristically formal, and it occurred to her that their family was breaking up. The democratically even relationships that they’d shared with each other in the past were giving way to fractured, specific, individual relationships within the overall family framework. They were not all equal anymore, and while she had a relationship with everyone here at the table, those relationships were different. It was as though they were diverse and separate people being held together only by force of habit and authority.

It was a disturbing thought, and she wanted it not to be true, but the dynamics of their family had changed and such a judgment seemed inescapable.

Perhaps this happened with all families as the kids grew older and grew up. It was impossible to remain static, to run in place forever. Maybe this was just part of the natural process, the evolution of parent-child-sibling relationships.

Maybe.

But she didn’t recall it happening with her parents when she was growing up. They had never gone through such a stage. Their family had remained intact, their relationships stable and unchanged, up through her father’s and then her mother’s deaths.

Maybe she and Gregory just weren’t good parents. Or, more likely, they were setting the tone for everyone else. God knows, they weren’t exactly behaving like June and Ward Cleaver these days. They were barely speaking, and when they did talk, it usually ended up in an argument. The reasons always seemed specific, unique to each conversation, but the pattern was definitely there, and she thought that maybe they should be making more of an effort to get along. Family relationships didn’t just happen, they needed to be nurtured and worked at, and they’d all been taking each other a little too much for granted, allowing things to get out of control and not setting them straight or correcting their course.

It was up to her to make the first move, and so she smiled at Gregory as she passed around the wooden Russian spoons. “How was your day?” she asked.

He looked up at her, and though it had been meant sincerely, though she’d been trying to indicate concerned interest, under the circumstances it came off sounding snide and sarcastic, and the expression on his face was one of annoyance. He frowned at her, didn’t answer.

That annoyed
her
, and she spent the rest of the meal talking to the kids, ignoring Gregory completely.

There were noises outside in the middle of the night, but Gregory didn’t think much about them. He heard some bumps and scratches and muffled thumps when he got up after midnight to take a leak, but he assumed they were animals or put them down to the wind, crawled back into bed, and once again fell asleep.

In the morning, however, when he walked outside to get his weekly copy of the
Monitor
, he saw that the noises had not been animals, had not been wind.

He stopped walking, stared at the house.

There was graffiti spray-painted on the walls to either side of the door: MOLOKAN on the left side, MURDERERS on the right.

MOLOKAN MURDERERS.

Gregory felt both angry and impotent as he stared at the epithet, filled with a rage that made him want to tear down the entire wall in order to remove the words. He felt violated. He’d been planning to repaint the house anyway, but the fact that he had been forced into it, that some punk kids or asshole adult had defaced his home, infuriated him. They had been on his property. They had sneaked into his sanctuary in the middle of the night and defaced it, defiled it. It was an invasion of his privacy, an invasion of his home, an attack on his family. No one had been hurt, but the potential was there, and as he looked at the words—

MOLOKAN MURDERERS.

—he knew it was only a matter of time.

A gun. A shotgun. That’s what he needed. Julia and his mother might go crazy, but goddamn it, they needed to be able to protect themselves. Even if he just filled it up with salt and pepper, or pellets, instead of buckshot, at least he’d be able to fend off any intruders. Next time it might not be just graffiti. Next time someone might try to hurt one of them. Nationally, hate crimes had been on the increase for years, and it usually took only a small incident to bring out old resentments, to allow hatred and prejudice to bubble to the surface.

And a series of murders in a small town?

People were going to be looking for scapegoats.

And that would be them.

With a gun, he would be able to protect himself. Himself and his family. Anyone who tried to harass them? He’d shoot the bastard’s legs out from underneath him.

He felt guilty at the thought—he was the only Molokan he knew who had ever even considered buying a gun—but it was a pleasurable sort of guilt, and he imagined those self-righteous old fucks at the church shaking their palsied hands and wetting their pants when they learned that he’d armed himself.

He stared at the spray-painted vandalism. What would his father have done?

Nothing
, a small, mean part of him said.

Turned his other cheek like a Christian, Gregory supposed—
like a pussy

—and not overreacted, not gone off half-cocked, not automatically planned how he could permanently injure and physically incapacitate the culprits. His father was a calm man, a peaceful man; there was no way he would ever have stooped to buying or using a weapon.

But those were different times and these were different people and, most important, he was not his father. He was not religious, not pious, and he did not believe it was wrong to fight fire with fire. There were times when a man had to stand up and be counted. He would not, for example, have allowed those losers outside the bar to insult and ridicule him in front of his family. He would have done something about it. He would have fought back. He might have been outnumbered, but he would have made the effort. He would not have allowed his wife and children to witness his weakness.

Weakness?

His father, he knew, would have considered it weakness to give in to the base desires for revenge and retribution. Those were privileges reserved only for God, and it was a sign of man’s transcendent potential that he could recognize this, that he could rise above the level of the animal and abide by God’s laws and wishes.

Gregory knew this, and he understood that his father had shown strength in that encounter, not weakness, that he had tried to set an example.

But he’d wanted him to do something different.

Gregory walked into the house, immediately called the police. Two officers arrived ten minutes later, and the rest of the morning was wasted answering questions, watching as photos were taken of the “crime scene” and an exhaustive search was conducted on and around the drive.

After the police left, he took his own photos for reference, then put on his crappiest clothes and walked back outside. Paint and brushes were in the storage shed, and while he didn’t have time to redo the whole house today, he painted over the words, leveling off the repainted segment just above the door so it would at least be slightly symmetrical.

Tomorrow, he would borrow a ladder and a paint gun from Odd and try to finish the rest of the house. If he started at dawn and worked until dusk, he might just be able to get one coat on.

If he was lucky, Odd would offer to help.

He took a shower, scraped the paint off his skin with a soapy fingernail, then put on clean clothes.

“We need some milk and sugar!” Julia called when he opened the bathroom door to let out some steam. “Do you want to go to the store?”

No, he didn’t want to go to the store, but he ran a comb through his hair and yelled, “Yeah, I’ll go!”

He walked out of the bathroom, grabbed his wallet and keys from the dresser. He met Teo in the hall. “Can I come too?” she asked.

“No,” he said. He rubbed the top of her head. “You stay here and be a good girl.”

He realized how patronizing he sounded, how dismissive, but he wanted to be alone, wanted some time to think, and he felt guilty for only the briefest second as he walked out to the kitchen, double-checked what he was supposed to buy, and left.

At the Fresh Buy he recognized several faces, but he made no effort to be friendly and simply picked up the groceries he’d come for. The other people seemed to be ignoring him anyway, giving him the cold shoulder, and he pretended he didn’t notice and didn’t care.

All of that changed at the counter.

Both checkstands were open today, but he picked the left one because the girl working the register was attractive and friendly and had already smiled at him when he caught her eye. He’d seen her before, at the café, and he seemed to recall that she’d made an effort even then to meet him. He was pretty sure that she’d told him her name, but he’d met a lot of new people lately, and he could not remember what it was.

“Kat,” the name tag informed him when he finally got close enough to see.

He placed the plastic milk carton and the sack of sugar on the checkstand’s conveyor belt.

She was a trainee, he noticed. Which was probably why he hadn’t seen her here before.

The checker smiled at him shyly. “Hello, Mr. Tomsaov.”

“Gregory,” he told her.

She tallied up his items on the register. “I just love what you’ve done to the coffeehouse. This place was so dead before you got here. You’ve really made a difference.”

That was exactly what he’d wanted to do, make a difference, and he smiled at her gratefully. “Thanks.”

“No, I really mean it. There was nothing to do in this town except rent videos or watch TV at night. Now we finally have some real entertainment.”

He nodded. “Glad you like it.”

“That’ll be four-twelve.”

He turned around and looked at her after leaving the market, and he reddened and walked quickly away after she caught him and smiled back. How old was she? Sasha’s age? She had to be. Or a little older, maybe. It was wrong for him even to look at her, much less allow the sort of fantasies that were starting to creep into his mind.

He’d had to park a few doors up the street, and he started toward the van but saw that one of the store-fronts he’d passed on his way into the market was a gun shop.

He stopped in front of the store, looked in the window. There were handguns and rifles, even what looked like a crossbow displayed behind the barred glass. It couldn’t hurt to take a peek, he thought, to check on prices.

MOLOKAN MURDERERS.

His heart pounded as he walked inside. His entrance rang a bell somewhere in the back of the shop. He felt like a child, a child doing something wrong, something of which his parents would not approve, but there was an illicit thrill in the feeling, and when an overweight man wearing military fatigues emerged from the darkened room behind the back counter, Gregory smiled at him.

The man looked at him suspiciously. “Anything I can do you for?”

Gregory wanted to browse, and he had a lot of questions, but the milk was getting warm, and he had to get going.

“You sell shotguns here?” he asked.

The shopkeeper gestured around. “All kinds of guns. You want ’em, I got ’em.”

“What are your hours?”

He pointed toward the window. “Like the sign says, eight to six, every day except Sunday.”

Gregory smiled, nodded. “Thanks.” He backed out of the store, aware that the suspicious expression had never left the man’s face.

Did the shopowner know who he was? Was the man involved in the vandalism of his house or did he know something about it? This was the type of closed-minded guy who probably went in for things like that, and Gregory no longer felt like he had done something slightly naughty. Instead he felt as though he had inadvertently crossed an invisible line and attempted to enter a world in which he did not belong, in which the inhabitants hated him and were out for his blood.