Since Gregor’s key was the only one she needed for the moment, and since it hadn’t disappeared, Lida was thinking about keys in only the most desultory way, because she was tired and drifty-headed and really in need of an early night. She had spent the past several hours making pastries of various kinds, for no good reason at all. God only knew she didn’t need to eat more desserts than she already did, and Gregor needed it even less. God only knew she had better things to do with her time than cook—or did she? That was a very hard question to answer. Lida didn’t know what a fifty-eight-year-old woman was supposed to do with her time. She just knew that she’d been feeling restless all evening, and wondered if she ought to take a vacation. She was much too jumpy to sit still, and so it had seemed the perfect solution to do some serious cooking and let her nerves do some good for somebody while she couldn’t make them calm down. Now it was eight-thirty and she was coming empty-handed out of Gregor Demarkian’s third-floor apartment, having left a pile of halvah in his refrigerator tall enough to qualify as a foothill. She felt like a complete idiot.
Not such good decorations this time, she thought, giving a last look at Gregor’s apartment door. It sported a single large metallic red-and-silver heart in honor of the upcoming Valentine’s Day, but nothing as exuberant as Donna ordinarily put up to celebrate a holiday. Donna Moradanyan decorated this entire town house, inside and out, and most of Cavanaugh Street on any excuse at all, and did it with energy too. One Christmas, she’d wrapped the entire front façade of Holy Trinity Armenian Christian Church in ribbon and tinsel until it looked like a package. One Halloween, she’d decorated a lamppost on Cavanaugh Street to look so convincingly like the Devil, someone had called a cop. This time Donna’s heart didn’t seem to be in it, so to speak. She didn’t seem to have the fire.
February, Lida murmured to herself, starting down the stairs. February. That’s all it is. I ought to get Hannah and go to the Bahamas until the good weather comes back. That would cheer me up.
She reached the half-landing, looking down the stairwell at what she expected to be nothingness, and stopped. There was definitely not nothing on the landing outside Bennis Hannaford’s apartment door. There was a tall young man with longish hair and an immense down parka, looking agitated. He must have heard her coming. He turned, caught sight of her on the half-landing, and relaxed a little.
“Hello,” he said. “I’m sorry if I startled you. The front door was unlocked, so I just came in—”
—the front door was always unlocked. Gregor was always lecturing old George and Bennis and Donna about how they ought to remember to lock it—
“—but now that I’ve gotten up here, I’ve knocked and knocked, and nobody answers, and I just don’t know what to do. I’m Christopher Hannaford.”
“Oh,” Lida said, feeling instantly better. “Oh, yes. Bennis’s brother. She told us you were coming.”
“She doesn’t seem to have remembered I was coming,” Christopher said. “She isn’t home.”
Lida came the rest of the way down the stairs to the second floor and looked thoughtfully at Bennis’s door. “I think I know where she is,” she said. “She must have gone to pick up Father Tibor at the demonstration—”
“Demonstration?”
“It was a protest of some kind he was involved in. I’m not really sure of the details. Anyway, she must have gone to get him, and not expected to be long, and then things happened to hold her up. Somehow, with Father Tibor, things always happen to hold you up.”
“I’ve heard.” Christopher grinned. “I get regular reports about Father Tibor and old George Tekemanian and Gregor Demarkian and Donna Moradanyan. Which one are you?”
“I’m none of those,” Lida said. “My name is Lida Arkmanian.”
“Oh, I’ve heard of you,” Christopher said. He stepped back a little and tilted his head to one side. Lida flushed and turned away. He made her—he made her so conscious of the way she looked. A small woman, still relatively thin—although not as thin as she had been—and relatively shapely, in spite of the fact that she’d had five children and—oh, who was she kidding? How old was this man? Forty? Less than forty? Her stomach stuck out. That was why she wore dresses with full skirts with elastic waistbands. After five children, anybody’s stomach would stick out, unless you had one of those operations, the way movie stars did and—what was the matter with her?
“You don’t look at all the way Bennis described you,” Christopher Hannaford was saying. “She makes everyone on Cavanaugh Street sound so foreign.”