The Town (32 page)

Oh, he could putter around the house, do yard work, fix up the storage shed, but those things weren’t necessary. And the truth was that things at the café were running themselves. He wasn’t needed. Shows were booked through the end of the month, there was no problem with any of the equipment, procedures were in place and working smoothly, and everything ran like clockwork. He didn’t have to be there.

In fact, he
hadn’t
been there for a while. He’d hung out, helped Paul and Odd with a few menial tasks, but he hadn’t been to a performance in over two weeks, and he hadn’t even bothered to check with the café’s other employees to find out how the shows had gone. He assumed that if there was a problem, someone would tell him. And since no one had told him, that must mean everything was fine.

Gregory sat up in bed. His work was done and he had nothing to take its place.

He didn’t know how to react, how to use this unstructured, unrestricted free time. He supposed he could try to think of other projects, but the truth was that his short burst of ambition and drive seemed to have fled, leaving in its place a disconcerting lethargy. He recalled, years ago, reading an interview with Pete Townsend, one of his idols. It had been a long interview, wide-ranging, and Pete had responded thoughtfully to all of the questions, but there was nothing he seemed excited about, nothing he seemed interested in, nothing he wanted to do. He and his wife had just had a baby, and he didn’t even seem interested in that. It was as if he’d seen everything, done everything, and there was nothing new. He was just putting in his time, waiting to die.

At the time, the interview had depressed the hell out of him, and he had not been able to understand how someone so rich, so famous, so talented, with so many things going for him, could have such an attitude. But he thought he understood now, because he felt the same way. He’d won the lottery. He no longer had to work, he could do whatever he wanted to do—and there
was
nothing he wanted to do.

He’d thought moving to McGuane would change his life, and it had. But not for the better. Things were not working out well here. He was not happy. He was not satisfied. He was not content. He was just . . . lost. And he didn’t know what to do about it.

He found himself wondering what his life would have been like had he remained with Andrea. She was completely different from Julia: flamboyant where Julia was subdued, spontaneous where Julia was thoughtful. He had loved her, he supposed—even though she was an outsider, as his mother had never ceased reminding him—and it had hurt him to break up with her, but it was the aftereffects of the breakup that had been hardest to deal with: having to explain to the family what had happened, having to adjust to seeing friends without her by his side, having to meet people by himself instead of on equal footing, as part of a couple. He was not meant to be alone, was not the kind of guy who did well by himself. He wasn’t clingy, but he needed a woman, and socially he worked better if he was part of a team.

It was why he’d gotten married again so quickly.

He had never thought of it that way before, had never even considered that the life he had now, the family he had now, had not sprung from a foundation of love and romance but had resulted from his unwillingness to be alone and his need to be married.

Did he love Julia?

He’d always thought he did, but now he wasn’t sure. They seemed to be drifting apart, and he didn’t think it was simply a temporary downturn on the graph that measured their relationship. They had moved to a small town in another state, basically cutting themselves off from their friends and their previous life. It was a sink-or-swim scenario, and they were sinking. They were not drawing closer together in this pressure-cooker situation—the test of true love in his book—but were coming apart. It pained him to think that the only reason their marriage had survived for so long on such a relatively even keel was because he had a life, she had a life, and they saw each other only on nights and weekends. Now that they were together so often, now that they had more of a life
together
, things were not working out.

And lately he’d been thinking about other women.

That was a shock to him. He’d never had any respect for those wealthy older men who dumped their longtime wives for some young chippie, had never had any use for married losers who looked elsewhere for sex and were unfaithful to their spouses, but now he could understand where they were coming from.

He thought of the checkout girl at the market.

Kat.

She seemed to like him. She always talked to him when he came through the line, always smiled at him when she saw him come in for groceries, and she had mentioned more than once that she was not married and had no boyfriend. She was a regular at the café as well, and Wynona had even joked that she only came to the concerts to look for him—which meant that he wasn’t the only one who had noticed her interest, that it wasn’t all in his mind.

Kat was a nice girl, and he had the feeling that she was more understanding than Julia, more open, more willing to compromise within the context of a relationship.

Not that he necessarily wanted a relationship with her.

But sex would be nice.

The last time he and Julia had had sex, it was the checkout girl he’d visualized as he pumped away between his wife’s thighs. He’d imagined a tighter vagina, slimmer hips, perkier breasts, and he had come much more quickly than usual.

He had been to the store only once since then, but in line he kept thinking of how Kat would look naked, how she would behave in bed.

She was probably wild.

She would probably let him do whatever he wanted.

“Gregory!” Julia called from downstairs. “Are you up? I’m going to do the breakfast dishes! This is your last chance!”

He groaned, rubbed his eyes.

“Gregory!”

He kicked off the covers, got out of bed. “I’m up!” he yelled as he walked into the bathroom, and there was a touch of anger in his voice. “I’m up!”

 

The kids were at school—a friend had picked up Sasha, Julia had driven Adam and Teo before she even tried to wake him up—and Julia was in the den, working on her children’s book. His mother, as usual, was at church or doing some other Molokan thing.

He was the only one at loose ends, and he found himself wandering around the house before finally drifting upstairs into the attic.

The attic was one of the old kind that he’d seen before in movies but never in real life. The entrance was not a small square hidden in the ceiling of the bedroom closet, as the attic in their California house had been. It was a large rectangle in the ceiling at the end of the upstairs hall, and when he unfastened the chain from its hook and pulled on it, a fold-out wooden ladder slid down. The attic itself paralleled the hall below and was slightly wider, tall enough for him to stand up in the center. They’d used it so far to store some of the boxes that had formerly been in their garage, and Julia had made him get a lock for the entrance so that the kids couldn’t play in there. He could reach the lock standing on tiptoe, but everyone else in the house needed a chair. He kept the only key on his ring.

He’d thought her precautions a little excessive at first—after all, the kids weren’t babies anymore—but now he was glad of them.

Gregory unlocked the lock, pulled on the chain, walked up the ladder.

Once inside, he pulled the ladder up and shut the trapdoor behind him. Walking to the end of the room, he reached up to a shelf above the small dormer window and took down the gun case.

He opened the case, took out his revolver.

He touched the cold metal, hefted the gun’s weight in his hand. He’d bought the revolver yesterday, and though he hadn’t told anyone about it, already he felt different, more confident. There’d been no more graffiti, no more vandalism, but he was ready if there was. He pointed the unloaded weapon at the opposite wall and pretended to fire. Any criminal who violated the sanctity of his home had better be prepared to face the consequences.

He’d wanted to tell Paul and Odd about his purchase, thought about telling them, but in the end he decided to keep it to himself. He’d been brought up in a household and a culture of pacifism, and for the most part those beliefs had taken. He felt right now like a little boy sneaking behind his parents’ backs to smoke behind the barn. He was doing something he shouldn’t, something he knew to be wrong, and on some level, he supposed, he was embarrassed about it.

But it gave him a sense of empowerment, and because of his background, because of his upbringing, he also felt like a pioneer, a rebel paving the way for others to follow.

He’d brought the gun into the house in a brown paper bag, and when Julia asked him what it was, he’d merely smiled and said nothing. The kids were still at school, and shortly afterward, she’d taken the van to drop something off at Deanna’s. His mother was asleep in her room.

So he’d taken the gun and its case out of the bag and brought it up to the attic. He’d originally planned to keep it under his bed, but he knew Julia might see it there, and so he decided on the attic instead. No one else ever went up there, and he could be assured that his purchase would remain a secret. He would not be able to get to it quickly, would not be able to stop a home-invasion robbery in progress, but that was not the kind of crime that happened too often in McGuane, and it was not the situation for which he was preparing. He was after the people who had defaced his home, the bigoted redneck assholes who blamed him and his family for the recent deaths and problems in town.

He looked down at the revolver in his hand and there was a sense of soothing satisfaction as he imagined the scenario: waking up in the middle of the night after hearing a noise, getting his weapon and going outside, surprising the intruder, the vandal dropping his spray can, going for his gun, and then clutching his chest as Gregory beat him to the draw and blew him away.

“Gregory!” Julia’s muffled voice called from downstairs.

He quickly slipped the revolver back into its case, shoved it back on the shelf, and quietly opened the trapdoor, hurrying down the ladder.

“Gregory!” Julia called.

“What?” he replied, and he smiled to himself as he closed the attic door, locked it, and headed downstairs.

Though it was cold, Gregory had left the van at home today, walking to work in order to burn off some of his fat. Julia drove down to the café around noon, thinking the two of them could have a pleasant little lunch together.

But the young woman grinding coffee behind the counter for an elderly man told her that she hadn’t seen Gregory all morning.

That was strange. Before leaving home, he’d specifically mentioned that he was going to the café today because the sound system needed some fiddling. Her first thought was that something might have happened to him. She hurried back to Paul’s office and found him going over invoices. Alone.

“Have you seen Gregory this morning?” she asked.

He frowned. “Gregory? He hasn’t been here all week.”

“He said he was going to work on the sound system today.”

“There’s nothing wrong with the sound system.”

She didn’t know what to say. Obviously, he had lied to her. Which meant nothing had happened to him and he was off doing something else, something secret, something he didn’t want her to know about.

She wondered if he was seeing someone else, if he was having an affair.

“Odd!” Paul called out. He smiled at Julia. “Don’t worry. We’ll track him down.”

From the alley in back of the café came a “Wait a sec!” and a moment later, Odd walked into the office, wiping greasy hands on an equally greasy rag. “Yeah?”

“Have you seen Gregory today?”

The old man nodded. “Sure. He was sitting on one of the benches in the park reading a magazine about twenty minutes ago. I think he was going to go over to the bar afterward. The Miner’s Tavern.” He looked sideways at Julia. “He don’t drink much, but he seems to have some kind of feeling for that place, although I don’t rightly know what it is.”

She smiled thinly. “Thanks.”

Odd nodded. “That all, boss?”

Paul grinned, waved him away. He turned toward Julia. “You going over there to get him?”

She shook her head. “I was going to meet him for lunch, but I guess I’ll just go home.”

“You’re welcome to join me,” Paul said. “I was getting ready to eat myself.”

She thought for a moment, then smiled. “Thanks,” she said. “I’d like that.”

“Grab yourself a table out there. I’ll just wash up and join you.”

She walked out of his office to the café proper, sitting down at a table near the window. Paul joined her a moment later. “Our lunch menu isn’t too extensive. How about a pizza bagel?”

“Sounds delicious,” she told him.

“And coffee?”

“Iced cappuccino?”

“Iced cappuccino it is.” He walked over to the counter, spoke to the girl, then returned and sat down across from her.

“I don’t mean to pry,” he said. “And I’ll understand if you don’t want to talk about it, but how are things with you and Gregory?”

She shrugged noncommittally. “Okay.”

“Lying to you? Not telling you where he’s going?” He held up a hand. “I know it’s none of my business, and you can tell me to buzz off, but that doesn’t sound ‘okay’ to me.”

“I’m sure there’s a reason for it. I’m sure there’s less here than meets the eye.”

“Maybe.” He nodded. “Maybe. But like I said, he hasn’t stopped by all week, and the last few times I’ve seen him, he’s seemed a little distracted, a little . . . I don’t know. Lost.”

Lost.
It was a good word, and it described her take on the situation perfectly. She was tempted to talk to Paul, to tell him everything—about Gregory’s increasing coldness toward her and the kids, the trouble they were all having adjusting to McGuane, even her little adventure up in Russiantown. But Paul was Gregory’s friend, not hers, and while he seemed sympathetic, she knew where his loyalties lay.