Cheating at Solitaire(23)

“Also, she can’t sit back and shut up to save her life,” Donna said.

The two of them turned around and looked at her, a little surprised to find that she was still there. Donna Moradanyan Donahue was as tall and fair as Bennis should have been, as if the two of them had been switched at birth, except that Donna was fifteen years younger. Having been released from the dietary strictures of pregnancy, she seemed to be mainlining caffeine in the form of thick Armenian coffee, right through the middle of the day. She drained the cup she had now and pushed it away from her, beginning to gather up her things.

“Look,” she said, “this is just not going to work. If you sit around here for the next five months doing nothing but worrying at all this stuff, there isn’t going to be any wedding, and then the women on this street are going to form a posse and kill both of you. You and Bennis, I mean, not you, Father. Never mind. Gregor, just make some sense, will you please? Go find yourself some work to do. Get yourself off the street for a while. Bennis has a book tour in February and early March—you can come back then. Then Russ and I can put her up for April and the first part of May, and—”

“You do realize how ridiculous it is,” Gregor said. “Ben-nis going to stay with you as if we hadn’t been living together for years.”

“Just get out of here,” Donna said. “You’re twitchier than she is, and she’s twitchy enough for an overpopulated séance. There’s got to be some police force in the country that has a murder they don’t know what to do with. Maybe the Bureau has a convention or something that you could go to.”

“The Federal Bureau of Investigation does not hold conventions.”

“whatever. Get out of here. Do something sensible. Let us take care of all the arrangements.”

“With you taking care of the arrangements, this is going to resemble a story out of the Arabian Nights.”

Donna had all her stuff in her bag, sort of. She’d left the top unzippered and things that looked like black ribbons spilling out. She slung it over her shoulder and reached for her coat on the coatrack next to the booth. “Do something with yourself,” she said. And then she stomped her way out of the plate glass front door and onto the street.

Everybody seemed to be stomping today. Gregor thought that that must mean something, but he wasn’t sure what. Ti-bor was sitting quietly over an empty plate that had once had big piles of lamb casserole on it, and the other diners, almost all of them people Gregor knew, were paying no attention to him. Everybody was stomping, and he was stomping too, and the reason was nowhere near as simple as “getting cold feet” about the wedding or being put off because, as things stood now, it looked as if they wouldn’t be able to hold it in church.

“You know,” he said to Tibor, “I’m really not getting cold feet about the wedding. Sometimes I worry that Bennis might be, but I’m not.”

“I didn’t think you were,” Tibor said.

“I’ve wanted this wedding since the year I met her,” Gregor said. “I didn’t even realize it, in the beginning. She was, I don’t know, not the sort of person I thought that sort of thing about, if there was any sort of person I thought that sort of thing about with Elizabeth dead just a year. But I did think it, unconsciously, if that makes sense.”

“Of course it makes sense.”

“I just wish it wasn’t such an enormous event. There’s something about the fuss that’s making me crazy. I tell myself I’m worried that it’s making her crazy, and that it’s going to make her back off, but I know that’s not the truth. She thrives on this stuff. I had no idea she could get this involved in planning something.”

“Most women like to plan their weddings, Krekor. It’s normal.”

“I know it’s normal. She isn’t normal. She’s never been normal.”

“Tcha. You’re playing with words.”

“I need to take a walk,” Gregor said. “Is that rude? I don’t want to be rude to you. I just need to take a walk.”

“Take your walk,” Tibor said.

Gregor had no idea if he was offended or not. He had no idea what the population of the Ararat would think about him going off and leaving Tibor alone at the table. He had only the vaguest idea what he wanted to do. Still, walking was a good idea, and he knew where he could walk to.

2

It wasn’t really a walk Gregor needed to go on. Even when he’d been much younger, it would have taken him hours to walk where he wanted to go. It helped, of course, that he was not admitting that there was somewhere he did want to go. It had been on his mind for days; he just hadn’t brought it to the surface. It was odd how things worked out sometimes. When he had first left Philadelphia, he had never expected to come back, or at least never expected to come back to Cavanaugh Street. But it wasn’t just the street. D.C. was a different place, a better place, as he saw it then. It was the place where he had built a reputation and a career among people whose opinions mattered in more than a local sense. Gregor was not a sentimentalist. He was not a fan of movies like It’s a Wonderful Life that pushed the line that the great wide world was nothing but flash and ashes, and everything meaningful was to be found at home. It had been good for him to get out of what Cavanaugh Street had been when he was living there. It had been good for him to get away from family and the familiar. There was a big world out there and people made contributions in it, contributions that helped everyone everywhere. He was, he thought, making a hash of it in his own head, but the basic meaning of it all was perfectly clear to him. He liked Cavanaugh Street. He liked the people he knew there, and he liked the fact that he had known many of them for so long that they shared history in a way that would never be possible with new acquaintances. There was something to be said for having someone for whom the assassination of John F. Kennedy was the thing that happened the day after old Father Mardun Destinian had been discovered half naked with Mrs. Machanian. There was also something to be said for having someone for whom the assassination of John F. Kennedy was just the assassination of John F. Kennedy, one of those things that linked a generation, like 9/11 would link the one coming up through the public schools now.