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.
3
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.