“Four.”
“I needed to talk to you about something.”
“You should not let Bennis go away on her own, even overnight,” Tibor said. “When you do that, nobody can sleep.”
“Tibor—”
“I know, I know,” Tibor said. “You need somebody to help you understand love.”
Gregor turned away and went looking for a chair. He had to take two piles of paperbacks off an ottoman to find a place to sit down. Maybe he was getting obsessive about this. Maybe he needed to do something—stabilizing—with his life.
Or something.
He sat down on the ottoman and stretched his feet out, trying to think of some way to begin.
Two
1
One of the good things about insomnia is that it always ends in a crash. Gregor Demarkian found that out on the long trip from Philadelphia to Waterbury. It could have been a much shorter trip, if he had known how to drive. According to Donna Moradanyan Donahue, who had given him a ride to his first train, it took only a couple of hours to get from Philadelphia to that part of Connecticut if you had something in the way of a Volvo and a decent set of maps from the AAA. Gregor had been too tired to listen to her, about this or anything else, and Donna had been too wound up to be perfectly clear. Her honey blonde hair had bopped restlessly in the breeze that came through the open car windows. Her very young, still unlined face had been set in frowns and furrows.
“The thing is,” she said, getting off the subject of Gregor’s inability to drive for the fifth time in thirty seconds, “I wouldn’t mind if I thought he actually wanted a relationship with Tommy. I mean, he’s Tommy’s father. Tommy should know his father. Do you see what I mean?”
“Yes,” Gregor said. This was still in Philadelphia, at the very beginning of the day, so he was more than a little wound up himself. He couldn’t have fallen asleep if he’d wanted to, then, but even the air around him looked too bright. Philadelphia looked dirty and vibrant, which is how he thought of it when he was being kind.
“And the thing is,” Donna said, “that of course I’ve talked this over with Russ, and for the first time, I’m just about ready to kill him. I mean, he thinks like a lawyer. Have you ever realized that?”
“He is a lawyer.”
“Well, yes. I know. But this isn’t his work we’re talking about. This is his life. My life. Tommy’s life. Don’t you think it would be a good thing if Russ adopted Tommy?”
“Yes,” Gregor said.
Donna Moradanyan and Russ Donahue had married only a few months ago—back in June, in fact, when Gregor had been distracted, too. Donna had a small son from a previous liaison, as Lida Arkmanian called it, with a man named Peter Desarian. Actually, Peter wasn’t really a man. He was no older than Donna, who was barely twenty-one herself, and he was, in Gregor’s opinion, one of the great examples of arrested development. Some boys grew up to be men. Peter Desarian had grown up to evolve a strategy for avoiding responsibility. Whenever he got into more trouble than he could handle, he moved back into his mother’s house.
“Anyway,” Donna said, “the thing is, according to Russ, if Peter wants to fight the adoption he can stop it. Because the law wants to keep families together. I mean, does this make any sense to you? Peter and I were never a family. We were never even a couple except when he wanted to, urn, I mean—”
“I think I get the point,” Gregor said.
“Well, it embarrasses me. I mean, no woman wants to admit that she lost her virginity to a jerk.”
“No woman has to worry that she’s alone in that circumstance.”
“I guess not. But you see what I mean. First he wanted me to have an abortion. Then when I wouldn’t have one, he refused to have anything at all to do with Tommy for years. Bennis went to the hospital with me when I was in labor. Lida Arkmanian bought him his christening gown. Father Tibor and old George Tekemanian taught him his first words. I mean, where was Peter Stupid Desarian?”
“He came back for your wedding,” Gregor said drily.
“Don’t remind me. Okay. I had cold feet or something. I don’t know. Something. But the fact is, he’s back again now, and I’m just not going to put up with it. Tommy’s very happy with Russ for a father. He really is. He’s got somebody to play board games with on Sunday afternoons. He’s got somebody who understands the Cartoon Network. I mean, Father Tibor’s a really wonderful man and all, but his idea of a bedtime story for Tommy was passages from the Odyssey.”
“I think you’ve got to go around here or you’re not going to have anywhere to park.”