“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.
3
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.