“What’s that all about?”
“It’s your safe space,” I said. “If something goes down, get in that closet, and hide behind the steel plate. Take your cell. You’ll have enough time to call the police. The plate should protect you if they start shooting through the closet door.” At least I hoped it would.
She listened with her tough-girl face on, but her eyes were anxious. “And if they open the door?”
I walked her into my bedroom and showed her the.38 Chief’s Special. “Do you know how to shoot?”
She opened the cylinder, saw its five chambers were empty, clicked it back into place, and pointed the compact revolver toward the wall, dry-firing it several times. “Yes.”
Full of surprises, my sister-in-law.
“When Kate Vare comes back, she’s going to go at you harder than ever. You can’t tell her about taking the dog tags. Ever. Understand?”
She said she did, and asked if I had.38 ammunition.
The next week passed dreamlike, uneventful. I was evermore conscious of how the days slipped by, time brutal. Robin and I agreed to some house rules. We wouldn’t go out. Move the Prelude into the garage, with its entry on the alley. Let the mail and newspapers pile up. Turn on the lights only in the interior rooms, such as the study and the kitchen, where I tacked up a blanket over the windows that looked into the yard.
We went through the tamales and almost all the cans of soup and frozen Lean Cuisines. I cooked breakfast until we were out of eggs. With the blankets on the windows, the room seemed like a scene out of a World War II blackout. There was nothing to be done about the big picture window in the living room, so we avoided it and kept the lights off. I called out an alarm service and made an appointment to install a system that we couldn’t afford.
Fortunately I had bought three large bottles of Beefeater before we became shut-ins. Robin, a wine drinker, began downing martinis. I had to start rationing olives. We drank the house’s only bottle of champagne on New Year’s Eve and I tried not to get nervous when I heard the fireworks. Robin would get in foul moods because she couldn’t go running but was otherwise decent company. She was not an omnivore reader, and unfortunately we had only two real art books: The Phoenix Art Museum catalog-the museum director and his wife lived around the corner-and an Edward Hopper album. So Robin drank each book dry, then watched television, searched for jobs on the Internet, and listened to her iPod while I tried to read. My history books had always been a refuge-my history porn, as Lindsey called it. They were less so now. My mind wandered.
