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Hardscrabble Road(4)

By:Jane Haddam


“The thing is,” Tibor said, coming back to the living room from the kitchen, “I can’t take the dog into the Ararat. The Melajians don’t mind, but apparently the city of Philadelphia does, and you can’t take dogs into restaurants unless they’re Seeing Eye dogs. I’d try to pass Godiva off as a Seeing Eye dog, but she’s too small and she’s, uh—”

“—A little too active?”

“Something like that, yes, Krekor. It’s really too bad, because Linda Melajian is very fond of her. But I think she would end up running all over the place and overturning tables and things if she got out of hand.”

“You can leave her here, can’t you? She can stay in the apartment for an hour.”

“She can stay, yes, Krekor, but she’s a Labrador retriever. She’s a very affectionate dog. She needs company. That’s why Grace didn’t leave her in her apartment and have me just come by and walk her and feed her a few times a day. They get depressed if they don’t have company, this kind of dog. So she’s staying here with me, and we sit together to watch television, and then at night she comes in and sleeps on the bed.”

“Don’t Labs get to be really big dogs? I mean, how is Grace going to feel about that sleeping on the bed stuff when the dog is fully grown and weighs a hundred pounds?”

“By then she will have gone to obedience school, Krekor. It will be all right. Give me a minute. I’ve forgotten where I put my wallet.”

“Look in the medicine cabinet,” Gregor said. “That’s where you usually leave it.”

“You’re perhaps not as respectful as you could be, Krekor, where a priest is concerned.”

Gregor liked to think he was unfailingly polite to everyone, which might or might not be true.





3


There had been a small problem with the dog, who had wanted to come with them until she dashed into the courtyard and realized how cold it was. Then she’d dashed back inside and begun crying pitifully to get them to come back in with her. Gregor thought she probably thought they were insane to be going out in this weather, and she was probably right. Tibor had compensated by spending a few minutes kneeling on the ground at the door and speaking to her in a cooing voice Gregor thought was usually reserved for babies in distress. He couldn’t believe Tibor hadn’t frozen his kneecaps to the slate tiles in the process. Then they had gone out through the courtyard and around the side of the church to Cavanaugh Street itself, and Tibor had had to stop and look inside.

“They really did a very wonderful job,” Tibor said. “And we don’t have the iconostasis anymore, which was only there because we took this over from a Greek Orthodox congregation, and isn’t really the Armenian way. And we have held off Hannah Krekorian and Sheila Kashinian, and there is no stained glass in the windows with pictures of St. George slaying the dragon on them. Sheila has no sense of place or time, do you understand that? And Hannah just goes along with her. I know that it’s too much to ask that American schools should teach the history of the Armenian Church, but the Armenian Church should teach it. What did you all learn in religion lessons when you were growing up?”

“Not much,” Gregor said. “The priest taught them himself and he only spoke Armenian, and most of us barely did. Also, he smelled, and he was a nasty man.”

“I think Sheila Kashinian secretly wants to be a Roman Catholic. I don’t mean as a matter of what they believe. I don’t think she knows what they believe. I don’t think she knows what we believe, or why there’s a difference. I think she wants to be Roman Catholic so she can sit in a Gothic church with stained glass windows and imagine herself becoming a nun.”

“Only if there’s an order that gets its habits through Nieman Marcus,” Gregor said.

“We need to be nicer, Krekor. Howard gave us ten thousand dollars for the new church.”

“Bennis gave more, and she doesn’t even believe in God.”

“I know, Krekor, but Bennis has more. Howard gave the ten thousand dollars and between that and the money Bennis gave, and all the smaller things, we have a new church that looks like it belongs to the Middle Ages, when people really gave money to churches. Of course, we have the kneelers, which is not traditional, but I think it was the right decision. People aren’t what they were. You can’t get them to kneel on the floor anymore. Even the pews are an innovation, really. In the early days, people didn’t sit in church. They either stood or kneeled and the floors they kneeled on were made of stone.”

“I’m surprised anybody ever came to liturgy.”