She had started toward the dining room again. She glanced back as he
followed her, indicating the pistol in his hand. “Going to bring that
to the table?”
Deciding he had come down a little heavy on her, he shook his head and
bugged his eyes out, trying to make a Christopher Lloyd face and lighten
the moment: “I think some of my rigatoni are still alive. I’d like to
eat them till they’re dead.”
“Well, you’ve got the shotgun behind the Coromandel for that,” she
reminded him.
“You’re right!” He put the pistol on top of the refrigerator agaIn.
“And if that doesn’t work, I can always take them out in the driveway
and run them over with the car!”
She pushed open the swinging door, and Hatch followed her into the
dining room.
Regina looked up and said, “Your food’s getting cold.”
Still making like Christopher Lloyd, Hatch said, “Then we’ll get some
sweaters and mittens for them!”
Regina giggled. Hatch adored the way she giggled.
After the dinner dishes were done, Regina went to her room to study.
“Big history test tomorrow,” she said.
Lindsey returned to her studio to try to get some work done. When she
sat down at her drawing board, she saw the second Browning It was still
atop the low art-supply cabinet, where Hatch had put it earlier in the
day.
She scowled at it. She didn’t necessarily disapprove of guns
themselves, but this one was more than merely a handgun. It was a
symbol of their powerlessness in the face of the amorphous threat that
hung over them.
Keeping a gun ever within reach seemed an admission that they were
desperate and couldu’t control their own destiny. The sight of a snake
coiled on the cabinet could not have carved a deeper scowl on her face.
She didn’t want Regina walking in and seeing it.
She pulled open the first drawer of the cabinet and shoved aside some
gum erasers and pencils to make room for the weapon. The Browning
barely fit in that shallow space. Closing the drawer, she felt better.
During the long morning and afternoon, she had accomplished nothing.
She had made lots of false starts with sketches that went nowhere. She
was not even close to being ready to prepare a canvas.
Masonite, actually. She worked on Masonite, as did most artists these
days, but she still thought of each rectangle as a canvas, as though she
were the reincarnation of an artist from another age and could not shake
her old way of thinking. Also, she painted in acrylics rather than
oils.
Masonite did not deteriorate over time the way canvas did, and acrylics
retained their true colors far better thin oil-based paints.
Of course if she didn’t do something soon’ it wouldn’t matter if she
used acrylics or cat’s piss. She couldn’t call herself an artist in the
first place if I. she come an a 1. couldn’t up with idea that excited
her and composition that did the idea justice. Picking up a thick
charcoal pencil, she leaned over the sketch pad that was open on the
drawing board in front of her. She tried to knock inspiration off its
perch and get its lazy butt flying again.
After no more than a minute, her gaze floated off the page, up and up,
until she was staring at the window. No interesting sight waited to
distract her tonight, no treetops gracefully swaying in a breeze or even
a patch of cerulean sky. The night beyond the pane was featureless.
The black backdrop transformed the window glass into a mirror in which
she saw herself looking over the top of the drawing board.
Because it was not a true mirror, her reflection was transparent,
ghostly, as if she had died and come back to haunt the last place she
had ever known on That was an unsettling thought, so she returned her
attention to the blank page of the drawing tablet in front of her.
I After Lindsey and Regina went upstairs, Hatch walked from room to room
on the ground floor, checking windows and doors to be sure they were
secured. He had inspected the locks before. Doing it again was