Hideaway

and dent on the car hood. As he followed her into the kitchen, he said, “This door was open. I locked it earlier.”
    “Oh, Regina left one of her books in the car when she came home from school. She went out just before dinner to get it.”
    “You should have made sure she locked up.”
    “It's only the door to the garage,” Lindsey said, heading toward the dining room.
    He put a hand on her shoulder to stop her, turned her around. “It's a point of vulnerability,” he said with perhaps more anxiety than such a minor breach of security warranted.
    “Aren't the outer garage doors locked?”
    “Yes, and this one should be locked, too.”
    “But as many times as we go back and forth from the kitchen”—they had a second refrigerator in the garage—“it's just convenient to leave the door unlocked. We've always left it unlocked.”
    “We don't any more,” he said firmly.
    They were face-to-face, and she studied him worriedly. He knew she thought he was walking a fine line between prudent precautions and a sort of quiet hysteria, even treading the wrong way over that line sometimes. On the other hand, she hadn't had the benefit of his nightmares and visions.
    Perhaps the same thought crossed Lindsey's mind, for she nodded and said, “Okay. I'm sorry. You're right.”
    He leaned back into the garage and turned off the lights. He closed the door, engaged the deadbolt—and felt no safer, really.
    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 don't like to eat them till they're dead.”
    “Well, you've got the shotgun behind the Coromandel screen 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 9mm. 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 couldn'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 than 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 she couldn't come up with an idea that excited her and a 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