Mohawk

that formed it. In the doorway of the Scallese Drugstore, Officer Gaffney turned up his coat collar. Inside the Mohawk Grill, Harry Saunders was warm.

20
    “This is the
last
time you’re going to be expected to climb these stairs,” Mrs. Grouse said when she and her husband reached the landing. Not quite out of earshot, she and Mather Grouse had just finished Thanksgiving dinner upstairs in their daughter’s flat. Anne had insisted on cooking the holiday meal, and of course the whole thing was a botch. Dallas had somehow gotten himself invited and then not shown up, which was typical, though they had waited for him until everything was ruined. Holding meals for people who were not punctual was something Mrs. Grouse herself did not approve of. Even when her husband was working, he knew what time dinner was served and knew better than to be late. He got off work at five, and dinner was on the table at five-fifteen, not five-twenty, because the walk home took fifteen minutes, not twenty. Occasionally Mrs. Grouse would stretch a point for the boy, but Dallas was a grown man, and there was no excuse for him. She would’ve said so, too, except that it wasn’t her place and, besides, her daughter was really to blame for inviting him in the first place, knowing full well what was likely to happen.
    “I’m fine,” said Mather Grouse. He, too, was irritable,though for a different reason. “Take your hand off my elbow, for pity’s sake.”
    “The idea of expecting you to climb these stairs and then wait around hours for your dinner. You must’ve been starved.”
    “I ate almonds. I ate walnuts. I ate deviled eggs. I ate grapes.”
    “That’s not dinner.”
    “She went to a lot of trouble.”
    “I never said—”
    They were at the bottom of the stairs now and entering their own kitchen, Mather Grouse holding the door for his wife. “Then stop being snippy. You’re just bent out of shape because somebody cooked a dinner besides you.”
    “Who ever heard of leg of lamb for Thanksgiving?”
    “I like it. I like lamb. I never get any.”
    “You can have leg of lamb any time you want. All you have to do is say.”
    “I’ve been wanting one for twenty years. How many have you cooked?”
    “A greasy mess.”
    “Mmmm.”
    “The house smells for days,” Mrs. Grouse said throwing wide open one of the windows, despite the bitter cold outside. “You can smell it all the way down here.”
    “Good,” Mather Grouse said, inhaling deeply. “I like the smell. Until the leftovers are gone, I’m going to eat upstairs. Go help your daughter with the dishes. I’ll be fine.”
    “Dirty lamb dishes. They’ll never be clean.”
    Worn out by the discussion and the long afternoonin somebody else’s home, Mather Grouse retreated to the living room and his favorite armchair, stopping only to turn on the football game. He was still angry with Dallas Younger, angrier than he could ever remember being with his ex-son-in-law, and that was saying something. Mather Grouse had no use for physical violence, but for some reason he always felt like thrashing Dallas—a strange urge, because he liked a good many men less than Dallas and had little desire to thrash them. Dallas wasn’t a bad fellow, actually. In fact, Mather Grouse could think of no one more genuinely harmless than Dallas Younger. And now that he thought about it, that was probably why he wanted to thrash him. With truly bad people even a horsewhipping did no good, but one might be just what Dallas needed, if only to make him pay attention.
    If he turned up now, there was a good chance he
would
get one, and not by Mather Grouse. Anne was furious, he knew, and he couldn’t blame her. It would’ve been nice to tell her so, but he couldn’t. Since the afternoon she had recalled him from the dead, he’d wanted many times to tell her how much he missed the closeness they had shared when she was a girl. He knew he was to blame, but knowing and knowing what to do about it were two different things. He also knew she had concluded that the cause of their separation was his disapproval, and he had never corrected her misunderstanding. There was no way that he could make her see that starting from the time she began to change from a girl into a woman, she had simply frightened him. This wasn’t just the matter of her womanhood. More than anything, it was the fact that she had inherited every significant feature of her personalityfrom himself, except restraint, and