Good Rich People(29)

LYLA



I tell Graham about the man in the courtyard. He is thrilled. He leads me to the sofa, where we sit together drinking Mo?t as the sun sets, and he asks me to describe him, recite the moment over and over.

“How tall?” “Were you scared?” “Then what?”

He is shocked that Demi punched the man. “How very cunning! I like a person who can think on their feet.”

“We need to fix the gate,” I point out, nauseous with Mo?t.

“Do you think he broke it?”

“I don’t know. He was tall. When are we going to fix it?”

“It’s being fixed. It’s from a monastery in Sicily or something. They can’t just repair it overnight. They have to pray over every piece.” I can’t tell if he is joking. He sips his Mo?t delicately, gazing out over the trees to the place in the fence where the man disappeared. “I wish I had been here. I would have . . .” He drifts off, riveted. It’s his dream to protect his property.

“We should at least put up a temporary gate,” I say, but he won’t. He likes it. He would probably like to never fix the gate at all.

After he finishes his Mo?t, he goes out to patrol the neighborhood. He brings a gun, even though I tell him he shouldn’t.

“I’m not going to shoot someone!” he protests when I try to explain that’s what guns are for.

Graham has an enormous safe in our closet that is filled with guns. He went through a brief hunting phase and then a shooting range phase before he switched to golf. Now he doesn’t use his guns for anything but he still has a wild array of them. Anything that’s legal, he has. And several things that strictly aren’t.

He comes back late and joins me in bed, where he lists all his suspicions like a boy detective: “That van outside hasn’t moved.”

I cuddle closer, drawn into the game. “It never does.”

Graham sets the gun on the bedside table, pointed toward the window. “Maybe there’s a dead body in there!”

“Do you think so?”

His lips tighten. He gets a blank look in his eyes, like he’s shuffling thoughts in the back of his mind. “Know what else is funny? Demi always has her curtains closed.”

“Does she?” My back braces. She was so odd today. First the way she struck a stranger, then the way she answered my questions, hurried out the door. It was as if she was afraid of getting too close. She knows something. What does she know?

Graham worries his lips. “It’s already so dark down there. Why would you close the curtains?”

“She said she likes the dark.” I tell Graham everything she said, how she claimed not to even know who Margo is. This seems to fascinate him.

“Hmm.” He reaches a careless hand out and spins the gun.

“Is that loaded?”

“The safety’s on,” he says, and then he quickly switches it on like I’m not watching.

“You shouldn’t have that out.” I roll over, away from him. “Really, Graham, I think you should put that back in the safe.”

“There was a robbery next door.”

My spine tingles. “What?”

“Last week. I wasn’t going to tell you because I didn’t want you to worry, but you should probably know. I should probably take you down to the range, teach you to shoot.” He seems sort of holy with this proposition, rapt. I remember when we first met, how he would make me watch Westerns and Tarantino films and make annoying clever comments: “That gun would be out of bullets” or “Heads don’t explode like that.”

He is wide-eyed and dreamy. I move closer, feel the heat coming off him. “What did they take?”

“Everything,” he says, beautifully transfixed. “They took everything.”



* * *





THE NEXT MORNING, Graham is up early. The housekeeper makes breakfast and Graham makes me tell her the story, then corrects my every sentence.

“She was terrified,” he concludes like my fear belongs to him, too.

He has a spring in his step. The sky is bright with the possibility of chaos. He leaves me with a gun.

“You have to turn the safety off, see? Right here. Make sure you do that first. Then”—Graham aims the gun at the window—“point and shoot. Simple.” He drops the gun on the table in the foyer.

“You left the safety off,” I say, flicking it on. “I really don’t think we need a gun out here.”

“They all have guns.” Graham cautions, looping his finger in a circle around us.

“But—”

“A man trespassed on our property. He threatened your tenant. Someone broke the gate. He’s clearly casing the neighborhood, or else he’s squatting somewhere.” He peers through the slats in the shutter. “I’m not asking you to shoot anyone. I just want you to be safe.” He seems elated at the prospect of us having a gun out, at his giving me a gun, like he is the husband he always dreamed of being. He steps toward me, brushes the hair from my forehead and kisses my temple, an actor walking through stage directions. “I need to protect you, darling.”

I savor the moment until he pulls away; then protest bubbles up my throat. “I don’t know how to shoot a gun.”