Milk drinker
—and he considered taking back the tip he’d included, but he knew he was probably reading meanings into things that weren’t there because of his conversation with Odd, and so he just smiled, nodded, and left.
He walked back to the café, where his van was parked.
When he got home, Gregory headed straight into the kitchen, found the bottle of aspirin in the cupboard next to Julia’s vitamins, and popped two tablets. He had one big bastard of a headache, and he closed his eyes against the pain, willing the aspirin to work faster. It seemed like he had a headache every time he walked into this damn house lately, and he wondered if he wasn’t allergic to something in here. Maybe there was something wrong with the insulation, or the cleanser or furniture spray they used was affecting him. Maybe it was one of Julia’s new drought-resistant plants. He didn’t know, but the headaches were starting to become a pattern, and that was a pattern he wanted to break.
The stress from what Odd had told him could not have helped, and maybe that was why the headache today was so much stronger than usual.
He walked into the living room, flipped on the TV, lay down on the couch, and closed his eyes.
The headaches made him irritable, and he realized that he’d been a little hard on Julia and his mother and the kids lately. He didn’t mean to take anything out on them, and he vowed that tonight he would be cheerful. He wouldn’t let any headache or allergy get the best of him, would not get angry with anyone for anything.
But later that evening Teo started fighting with Adam, playing with the remote control and speeding through television channels, running back and forth between the living room and the kitchen, and he ended up yelling at her and sending her to her room. Julia thought he overreacted, but she didn’t say anything until they were in bed, and then they wound up getting into a fight. They’d been having a lot of fights lately, and he was getting tired of it, and then they started fighting about that.
Julia finally refused to respond to his increasingly angry arguments, and she pulled the blanket up around her neck and turned away from him, facing the other direction.
He was sorely tempted to go downstairs and sleep on the couch. That would teach her a lesson. They’d never slept apart in all the years they’d been married, had made a pact after their first fight that they would always try to resolve their differences before bedtime and never sleep separately, but tonight he would have moved down to the couch had his mother and the kids not been here. It would be too difficult to explain to them, though, and he pulled up his own side of the blanket, turned away from her, and closed his eyes until he finally fell asleep.
2
Julia wandered through the ruins of Russiantown.
She did not know what had compelled her to come here, why she had walked all this way to look at a bunch of abandoned shacks, but ever since Paul and Deanna had led them on the walk through McGuane she hadn’t stopped thinking about this place.
She peeked into the open doorway of a one-room house with no roof, saw a collection of rusted tin cans lined up in what remained of an open cabinet, saw clumps of dead dried weeds poking through missing sections of floor. There was no furniture in the tiny shack, just as there’d been no furniture in most of the abandoned houses she’d looked through, and she chose to believe that families had taken their belongings with them when they’d moved to better homes.
Several of the buildings were no longer standing, were nothing but cement foundations and stumps of charred beam, and she could not help wondering when the fires had occurred. She’d asked Gregory’s mother about Russiantown, but the old woman had not wanted to talk about the subject. There was an element of denial or cover-up in her refusal to speak, even after all these years, that made Julia think that something bad had happened here.
What was it that Paul had said? There’d been problems in the past? That was vague enough to cover a multitude of sins.
She was surprised that Gregory wasn’t more conversant with the specifics of Molokan history in McGuane, but she knew how secretive her own parents had always been about their past, and she understood how it could happen. She’d had a friend in college, Janet Yoshizumi, whose parents had been interned at Manzanar during World War II, and she recalled how Janet had said that they never discussed their internment, that they refused to talk about it and chose to pretend that it hadn’t happened.
Was that what had happened here? Something so bad that no one wanted to talk about it?
She was probably romanticizing what was no doubt a very ordinary, very prosaic chapter in local history, but unanswered questions invited that sort of speculation.
She could go to the library, she thought, see if she could find some information about Russiantown.
No. She’d rather not know than have to see Marge and her pals again.
She stepped over a small prickly pear and walked over to the next empty house.
It was strange how interested she’d become in not just Russiantown but all things Molokan since they’d moved here. She’d never understood the fascination some people seemed to have for their roots, their ethnic background, and she’d always dismissed as trendy and self-absorbed those women who tried to track down distant relatives in distant lands or who spent money on classes to learn the languages and cultures of the nations their ancestors had left behind. But she was beginning to understand that connection to the past. She herself had been feeling more Russian since they’d moved here. She was not sure if it was because Gregory’s mother was living with them, or because everything was so personalized and community-conscious in a small town compared to the anonymous individuality of life in a metropolitan area, but it was as if her American veneer was cracking, gradually revealing the Russian beneath.
Maybe the fact that she wasn’t feeling as close to Gregory as before had something to do with it, the fact that their relationship was no longer there to support her against the influences of the outside world.
She couldn’t sustain her lifelong rebellion against Molokan culture knowing she did not have him to lean on.
They’d been fighting a lot lately, and sometimes it felt as though they were two strangers living in the same house rather than a couple who had been together for eighteen years. She’d never believed those dire warnings that money could ruin a person’s life, attributing their origin to the rich who wanted to keep the poor content with their lot by pretending that it was better not to have money, that poverty was somehow morally superior to wealth.
And, truth be told, it wasn’t money that had changed their lives.
It was moving to McGuane.
Although they’d been able to move to McGuane only because they’d won the lottery.
She peeked in a back window of a big house, saw the rusted skeleton of an old bed, the rotted wood of what had probably been a vanity. On one remaining wall hung the top three sides of an empty frame, glittering shattered glass visible in the pile of dirt and dust beneath it.
Deep down, she wished they’d never left California. Or at least that they’d moved somewhere else. New England, perhaps. Or the Pacific Northwest.
Anywhere but Arizona.
She did not like this house, and rather than peek in one of the other windows or walk inside, she headed up a rocky path behind it, past the crumbling walls of a banya, to a building that looked like it had once been a store or a place of business. She stood for a moment with her hands on her hips, sizing it up. It was definitely not a house, and though there were cracks and rock holes in the dust-covered windows, the glass was still there for the most part, and she cupped her hands on the sides of her eyes and peered inside. She saw a leaning desk, an overturned chair, what looked like a broken safe.