He stopped at the construction site and spent a moment or two watching the crews hauling a large piece of stone to a well of concrete that seemed to have been constructed as a place for it. If he’d thought about it at the time, he would have said that he expected a new church to rise on the site of the old one in about six months to a year. It had been longer than six months, and the new church had barely been started. There had been a lot of debris to clear away, and too much left standing that could not be left standing if reconstruction was to take place. For months nothing had happened out here but blasting and tearing down and hauling away, as if the contractors were in league with the people who had bombed the place and they only wanted to finish the job.
He made himself stop looking at it and walked on up the street. He considered buying the paper at the newsstand or Ohanian’s and decided against both. The news made him mostly depressed these days. He went into the Ararat and looked around. Bennis was not in the restaurant. This was where she had said she was going, but this was not where she was. Tibor was sitting by himself on the long, low padded benches of the window table. Grace was gone, too.
Gregor unbuttoned his coat and wondered what it meant that he hadn’t noticed the cold while he was walking outside. He put the coat on the hook next to the window table and slid in opposite Tibor.
“Where’s Grace?” he said. “I saw you walking with Grace near the church this morning.”
“She went with Bennis to buy a velvet dress,” Tibor said.
“This is a requirement for the concert Grace is playing at the week after next, I think. Or next week. She needs a velvet dress.”
Linda Melajian came over with a cup and a saucer and the Pyrex coffeepot. “Gregor,” she said, “I’ll order you a breakfast special as soon as I get Hannah Krekorian her cruller.”
“I don’t want the breakfast special, Linda, thanks. I’m not hungry. I’ll just have coffee.”
“Oh, for God’s sake,” Linda said.
“What?” Gregor said. “I’m not hungry. It happens. I can’t always eat two pounds of sausage and potatoes in the morning.”
“Forget always,” Linda said, “you haven’t eaten anything for breakfast for two weeks. It’s like you’re on a hunger strike or something.”
“Do I look like I’m on a hunger strike?”
“So, fine, what is it? You’ve decided you hate the food here? You’re too good for us?”
“Linda.”
“I’ll get you the breakfast special,” Linda said, “and you’ll eat it.”
She whirled around and went marching away across the room to the narrow door at the back that led to the kitchen. Gregor watched her with something like shock.
“That was interesting,” he said. “Whatever is wrong with her?”
Tibor cleared his throat. He was younger than Gregor, but he had been more hardly used. He looked older. This morning he also looked tired.
“It is you there’s something wrong with, Krekor,” he said. “You do not act like yourself.”
“I don’t see who else I could be acting like. I am myself.”
“You are not yourself,” Tibor said again. Gregor might have been imagining it, but Tibor’s accent sounded thicker than it had for years. Tibor was having the breakfast special. He had a big oval plate in front of him with scrambled eggs, sausage, fried potatoes, and toast spread across it like the debris looters leave after a citywide blackout.
“Listen,” Gregor said. “I think I proposed to Bennis this morning.”
“You think?”
“It was a little complicated. I didn’t exactly put it—in the form of a question. I didn’t exactly—”
“Well, Krekor, you must have done something exactly because Bennis was here and she was not in a good mood. She was in a very bad mood. She was, ah, furious—”
“Angry as hell?”
“That, yes. Angry as hell. Snapping at people. Throwing things. I do not think this is the way she would be if you had just proposed to her. I think she would have said yes and gone shopping.”
“Bennis doesn’t shop much.”
“She would shop for a wedding, Krekor, believe me.”
“Right,” Gregor said.
Linda Melajian came back with the breakfast special in her hands. She slammed the plate down on the table in front of Gregor hard enough to make the sausages jump. “There was one coming up and I diverted it to you. Eat something. Maybe you’ll make more sense.”
“Why am I not making sense?” Gregor said.
“Men,” Linda Melajian said. “God, I don’t understand what any of you think you’re doing. I really don’t. You’ve all got your heads screwed on backward, and then you blame it all on us when things go wrong.”