Oren
When Lexi brought Cristofer into the kitchen, I was sitting at the table. I had opened all of the downstairs closets but hadn’t found my dad’s guns. So instead of jamming them and stealing the ammunition, I had cleaned my jacket, put a crease in my pants, and polished my shoes. ‘Good morning,’ I said.
‘No,’ Lexi said.
Cristofer let her use a wet towel to wipe the blood from his face.
The chickens hadn’t been part of the plan, but Paul was nothing if not an enthusiast.
In the front room, Walter sat on a green leather chair, his feet planted on the floor, his hands gripping the cracked leather on the arms. The chair had once been my dad’s, but Walter sat on it as if it was a personal throne.
Kay came downstairs, and I don’t know if she’d been watching the chicken pen from her bedroom window, but she went to Walter and kneeled on the floor. She whispered to him words that I couldn’t hear, and after a while the anger fell from his face. He ran his fingers through her long hair, and she laughed and then he laughed too, a loving laugh that carved a space around them and excluded everyone else.
Lexi looked at the hem of her nightgown and Cristofer’s blood on it. She looked at me. ‘No breakfast this morning,’ she said, then asked, ‘Where’s your driver?’
‘He went for a walk in the woods,’ I said.
‘I didn’t see him go,’ she said.
‘He was out before the sun came up.’
‘The two of you missed the excitement,’ she said. ‘Some of it anyway.’ She went into the front room and pulled the nightgown off over her head. She balled it up with the bloodstain on the outside, dropped it on Walter’s lap, and went upstairs.
‘Filthy girl,’ Walter shouted after her.