Cheating at Solitaire(21)

She was about to ask him why so much of the purple of the truck had not been covered by falling snow when he stepped back again, turned to her, and said, “He didn’t hit his head. Somebody put a gunshot through it.”





Part I





Chapter One


1

Gregor Demarkian had been born and brought up on Ca-vanaugh Street, and married there when he was in his twenties. He knew everything there was to know about how this place reacted to the expectation of a marriage, right down to the superstitious things the Very Old Ladies would do in the privacy of their living rooms when Father Tibor Kasparian wasn’t around to scold them. He had no idea why he had thought things would be different, now, for him. Maybe it was that Cavanaugh Street was so very changed from the way it had been when he had grown up here. There had been a lot of rising tides raising boats in the course of that something-more-than-half-century, and what had started as a cramped blank space of tenements and peeling paint had ended, now, as one of the most upscale gentrified neighborhoods in the city of Philadelphia. The building where Gregor had been born didn’t even exist anymore. Howard Kashinian’s development company had had it torn down, nearly a decade before Gregor moved back to the street, and replaced it with three four-story brick town houses, each offering a single long apartment on each of its four floors. The disintegrating brown-stone where Lida Kazanjian Arkmanian had been brought up did exist, but the fifteen other families that had lived there were gone, and Lida had bought the place, had it gutted, and turned it into a showplace that had been featured on the cover of Metropolitan Home. It was a different world, with different expectations. These days the wives expected to spend their winter vacations in the Bahamas and the children expected to go to college when their time came—and a good college, too, not just whatever was on offer locally in the community college system. Sheila and Howard Kashinian’s daughter Deanna had had a huge, expensive party for her sixteenth birthday that was featured on a televison show called My Super Sweet Sixteen. Elda and Michael Valadanian’s son David had just been appointed, at thirty-two, the youngest federal court judge in the history of the Eleventh Circuit. Susan Kasmanian, Hannah Kasmanian’s niece, had been accepted to study for a doctorate in mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. This was not the kind of place that insisted on wrapping up the bride and groom in flower garlands so that widows could spit on them for luck.

Maybe Gregor had simply assumed that all that kind of thing would be ignored because the woman he was marrying was not herself Armenian. In fact, Bennis Hannaford was nearly the polar opposite of Armenian, in spite of the fact that she was eerily small and dark, as if in revolt against generations of tall, pale, blond English ancestors. She was a Hannaford of the Main Line Hannafords. That great pile of a house was still sitting out there, in Bryn Mawr, waiting for her brothers to decide what to do with it. She had come out at the Philadelphia Assemblies. She had graduated from Agnes Irwin and Vassar. She even sounded more like Katharine Hepburn than anybody else Gregor had ever heard. He couldn’t imagine anybody thinking she could spit on Bennis for any reason at all, and he had a sneaking suspicion that before she allowed herself to be wrapped in flower garlands, Bennis would insist on being naked.

Still, here he was, on the second of January, months before there was going to be anything like an actual wedding, letting Donna Moradanyan Donahue wrap a tape measure around his head.

“Stop making such a fuss,” she said. “I’m the one who should be screaming bloody murder. I’ve just had a baby.”

“That’s true,” Gregor said. “You should be home with Martha Grace. You should be fighting with your mother-in-law about what church she’s going to be baptized into.”

“I’m letting Russ fight with his mother,” Donna said. “It’s counterproductive when I do it. I just need to get the proportions right here. I mean, you don’t want your head to be up on Lida’s roof looking like Charles Manson or something, do you?”

“I don’t want my head up on Lida’s roof at all. And you can’t claim this is some kind of Armenian tradition, because I know better.”

“It’s my tradition,” Donna said. “Just wait till you see what I do for the wedding. I’m going to cover the entire street. Well, except for the church. Father Tibor—”

“You cannot wrap the church in shiny paper,” Tibor said. “It’s not respectful.”

“I wouldn’t think it would even be possible,” Gregor said.