As in times of past crises, for some reason I felt more comfortable sleeping on the couch. Maybe because it reminded me of my parents, or because I found a certain solace in the books and photo collages. Anna and I always slept only six hours, and virtually nothing could change our internal clocks. We both quietly got dressed as though afraid to alert the other to our presence.
The swelling had gone down a little, leaving only a few crusted abrasions and sore knots the size of peach pits. I emptied the lukewarm water from the ice pack and refilled it with ice. At his worst, loaded every night, my father used to hide gin in the rubber bladder, and despite the years it still smelled faintly of liquor. Anubis caught a whiff and snorted happily, tongue poking out an inch and his tail thumping loudly. I always suspected my father didn't like to drink alone.
I heard nothing more from my grandmother's bedroom, and sat wondering what kind of revelations might be heading my way and how bad they would be.
Before leaving the Conway house, I'd had a brief but compact discussion with Lowell on everything that had happened during the day. He stood with a completely stone countenance, the way Nick Crummler might have, and silently seethed as the bodies in the Grove piled up. Sheriff Broghin got sick all over the floor before they'd even finished bagging all the evidence. Keaton Wallace, another drinking partner of my father's back when they'd wandered home together, shirtless and singing "The Loveliest Night of the Year," looked pleased with himself; even at his most intoxicated Wallace had never fouled up a crime scene or vomited across a chalk line. Lowell listened to me, the muscles in his jaws looking hard enough to withstand a thrown brick, knowing he had to get Crummler out of Panecraft, but realizing they were both too mired in the system.
Thinking about some of that, still stroking Anubis, I fell asleep.
When I awoke the second time Anna sat reading Charles Williams' Go Home, Stranger in the living room. I checked my watch: 7:30. Over an hour had passed, but Anubis still sat at my side and my hand was still on his back. He turned and looked at me inspecting the damage, or wanting more gin. He didn't shove at me to take him for a walk the way he used to do. I had a feeling he'd never want to go for a walk again.
Anna said, "Good morning, Jonathan. How are you feeling?"
I sat up and my neck cracked so loudly that it echoed in the kitchen. "I don't think I can honestly answer that in mixed company."
"How is your vision? Blurred at all?"
“No."
"That's reassuring. Still, we should not have been so hasty to leave the hospital last night. Such a ridiculous place, to keep us waiting over an hour."
She took the ice pack into the kitchen and refilled it with even more cubes, returned and placed it on the top of my head. I felt significantly silly. Anubis wagged his tail some more, thinking there was another few shots in it for him. My grandmother took my face in her hands the way she had last night, and I got that same sense of my adulthood crumbling between her fingers until I was a little boy again. "Do you feel hungry? Would you like some breakfast? There is an egg-white omelet and French toast still heated on the oven."
"No, thank you, I'm going to have breakfast with Katie."
"Good, you haven't seen her much the past few days."
"I need to talk to her. I need to talk to you, too."
She dropped the open book in her lap, bending the spine in a fashion that made me cringe: the dry, dissolving fifty-year-old glue gave up the long battle of holding in yellowed pages. She loved to read but, like Teddy, didn't love books. "Have you decided on definitive plans for your future with her?"
"No," I told her, and felt foolish saying it, as if the woman I loved and our unborn child deserved only my fear and not enough of my time. "I need to tell her that someone broke into the shop last night."
"There is such a thing as a floral thief?"
"Vandals."
"Oh dear, was there much damage?"
"Lowell says no."
She didn't even have to consider it for long. Sunlight drifted over her legs and caught in the spokes where it danced, giving her a silver sheen. "And you believe it might be your former teammate?"
"Arnie Devington, yeah."
Anna sighed, something like a sound of defeat, but not quite. It scared me a little anyway, and I perked up in my seat. She must have also smelled the gin, and been thinking some of the same thoughts as I was, the dead past always clutching like inflexible fists. "Do you plan to wallop him further?"
"I think I've had enough of that lately."
"I agree. Despite his fixations he is someone more deserving of pity, from what you've told me."
"Maybe. It's a moot point, more or less. He's gotten a few extra licks in, maybe he's flushed it out of his system."
"Perhaps you have as well, Jonathan. You don't appear nearly as agitated as before."
"I said what I had to say, but instead of cooling him off I may have just pushed all the wrong buttons. He hit the shop, but not when Katie was there. I think he must've realized he was breaking the rules. Same as when I made that crack about his wife."
"And you feel, after all this time, rules must be applied."
I tried to find that rage I'd felt that day in their yard, but all I could come up with was the sickness of seeing that family so tied to their own losses, the busted glass in their overgrown grass like the regrets and broken expectations of their lives. "Yeah, I suppose I do, though I'm not sure why."
"Because you must follow an honorable course," my grandmother said, "even if it brings you into contact with miscreants."
My head began to throb worse, sending a surf of pain into the back of my eyes. Everything we talked about seemed to be merely preamble.
"Deputy Tully may be in a better position to cool him off," she said.
"That would involve walloping, I think."
"Maybe not."
I thought of calling Katie, but about now she'd be in the throes of morning sickness and heading back to bed for another hour of sleep. Anna read the Williams novel, tugging too hard on the frail pages so that every so often I heard the soft snap of paper peeling free from the spine. My stomach spun in time with the thrumming behind my eyes. I cared too much about books. I should've been capable enough to stick them on the shelves of the flower shop and watch over an infant crawling across the carpet. I should've been bold enough to go out to lunch at Pembleton's and eat purple stuff every day like the rest of them. So where did all the resistance come from? The kind I hadn't even felt last night while Shanks stood this close to beating me to death.
Anna said, "We must talk."
"Okay."
We kept silent for a few more minutes.
She shifted in her wheelchair and Go Home, Stranger fell from her lap and struck Anubis across his toenails. As if he was playing the shell game, he immediately moved his paw and covered the title.
"You apparently feel at odds with me. Or worse, you feel I am in conflict with you. That isn't the case, Jonathan, nor could it ever be. You're concerned that I am not being completely open with you about this investigation."
Like "plotted" and "case," my grandmother enjoyed the word "investigation," even though all I'd learned so far was how little I knew. I no longer accepted the possibility that Wallace had been bribed or duped by a fake passport-an idea that had drifted like smoke, like the life of Teddy himself. I still had no idea why Teddy had been murdered, or why Crummler had been set up, or what Harnes planned to do with him, especially now that Shanks had been killed as well. Above all that, more meaningful to me at this minute, remained the fact that I was extremely worried about all my grandmother wasn't telling me.