Living Witness(99)

“I don’t,” Bennis said.

“You don’t find anything odd anymore,” Gregor said. “You spend too much time with Donna and Tibor. But I want to know. Does the Catholic Church have anything to say about the science, or are they worried about declining moral values and the rise in drug abuse and the attempts of radical secularists to make it a crime to be a practicing Christian in America.”

“What?”

“That’s the kind of thing I’m getting,” Gregor said. “I don’t know what I thought I was going to find when I got here, but it’s nothing at all like what I’ve got. So if you could get in touch with Sister Beata and explain my problem and get some information for me, I’d appreciate it. I’d really like to have a better handle on what it is I’m supposed to be dealing with here.”

“Are you staying up there for the duration?” Bennis asked. “You’re going to need some clothes if you are.”

“I’m hoping to be home tonight,” Gregor said. “And I mean it. But, yes. Just in case, it had occurred to me to ask one of the people who are showing me around if we could run out to a store somewhere. I’m pretty sure I saw a Wal-Mart on the way in.”

“Gregor Demarkian shopping at Wal-Mart. There’s something I’d like to see.”

“Call Sister Beata,” Gregor said. “I’ve got to get ready in time for Gary Albright to give me a ride down to Main Street.”

Gregor closed up the phone and looked at it in his hand. It was a black phone, and he had not told her he loved her when he said goodbye. He almost never told her he loved her. He hadn’t told Elizabeth, either, except at the very end.

Maybe that meant something, but he didn’t know what.





2




Gary Albright was dressed and waiting by the door by the time that Gregor made it upstairs. He didn’t look impatient, but then he never looked impatient. That was something else Gregor had noticed about people who had spent a certain amount of time in the military. Sarah was waiting by the door, too, and she seemed not so much impatient as exasperated.

“Let the man eat breakfast, Gary,” she said. “Not everybody can be you and function on nothing but coffee for three days running.”

Gregor glanced involuntarily at Gary’s legs—he didn’t actually know which one the man had lost; he thought John Jackman might have told him, but it had slipped his mind, and he hadn’t been paying attention in the time since—and then looked away again.

“I don’t need breakfast,” he said. “It’s very kind of you to ask, but I almost never eat breakfast. Coffee will be more than fine.”

This was not true. Gregor ate almost every morning of his life at the Ararat, and, if anything, he ate too much breakfast. He wasn’t hungry now, though, and although he’d found nothing particularly awful about Sarah’s cooking, he’d found nothing particularly wonderful about it, either. The great White Anglo-Saxon Protestant culinary ethic. There was something wrong with food if it tasted like anything at all.

“He still shouldn’t be stuffing you in the car when you’re practically still in bed,” Sarah said.

“Do you drink coffee?” Gary asked. “Or do you drink that caramel chocolate crappu–”

“Gary.”

“Sorry,” Gary said.

“I drink coffee,” Gregor said. “I’ve never been able to figure out how to order one of those, you know, whatevers.”

“You’d think a man would be ashamed,” Gary said. “But I don’t know. You’re from the city. Maybe that’s what everybody does up there.”

“It’s Philadelphia, not Fire Island,” Gregor said. “We’re pretty normal, most of the time.”

“Of course you are,” Sarah said. “Don’t listen to him, Mr. Demarkian. He’s convinced the entire country is going to Hades in a handbasket. I keep telling him, if he’s so sure, then we should send Michael and Lily to the Christian school, but he won’t listen to me.”

“It’s not a Christian school,” Gary said. “It’s Nick Frapp’s school.”

“He means a school for hillbillies,” Sarah said. “But we’ve got friends from church who send their children to that school, and they’re very happy with it. And it isn’t like it used to be. There aren’t so many hillbillies anymore, not the way Gary is remembering them.”

“You only think that because you don’t see them,” Gary said. He got his hands out of his pockets. His keys came with them. “We’d better go. I’ve got to at least pretend I’m running the department. And Mr. Demarkian has to deal with Dale Vardan.”