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.
People are talking.
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.
He walked directly to the van without looking back, placed the grocery sack on the passenger seat next to him, and made a U-turn in the middle of the street.
He drove.
He knew there was cold milk that he needed to get into the refrigerator, but instead of going straight home he headed up to the Molokan cemetery. He had not consciously intended that to be his destination and was not even fully cognizant of the fact that that was where he was heading until he was on the narrow road winding up the ridge.
Gregory parked in front of the gates and got out of the van, not bothering to lock it. Although he could not see the huge, gaping pit of the mine from this far back on the cliff, he could see, beyond it, part of the town—buildings and houses snaking up the opposite canyons in paths determined by the roads.
He walked slowly through the gates into the cemetery.
MOLOKAN MURDERERS.
Did people really believe that he and his family were responsible for what was happening in McGuane? It didn’t seem possible, but he was reminded of books and movies in which innocent newcomers were blamed by superstitious townsfolk for bad things that occurred and were attacked and lynched or beaten as their homes were burned to the ground.
Such a thing was not going to happen here.
He would make sure of that.
He walked over the rocky ground, around and between old headstones, until he was standing before his father’s grave. He looked down at the weathered stone and the slightly sunken gravesite. He didn’t know why he had come here. He was not one of those people who talked to the dead, who remained next to a grave attempting to communicate with someone who had passed on. He stood there silently, staring, thinking not of his father’s death but his life, not of where he might be or what might have happened to him after dying but of what had happened to him while he was alive.
He thought about the rednecks outside the bar.
“Milk drinker.”
He felt sorry for his father, he realized, and somehow pity seemed a sadder thing to feel than anger. He felt unaccountably depressed, and he wished he could believe that his father would hear him if he talked, but the truth was that he thought that sort of one-sided conversation was for the living, not the dead. It made the survivors feel better. The dead were dead, and whether they went on to Nirvana or heaven, or whether their brains simply stopped and they rotted into nothing, they were not here, they could not understand, they did not care.