“What if it isn’t just kids and fireworks next time?” Nathan asked.
Bullet to the back of the head. She tasted something unpleasant in the back of her mouth. “You don’t have a permit.”
“I’ll get one,” Nathan said with a shrug.
“No,” Emma said.
“They’re our property,” Nathan said, as if that was her objection.
“Nathan, I do not want those things in this house.”
“I’m not going to sit here defenseless,” Nathan said.
“Get rid of them,” she said, voice flat and angry. And before Nathan could argue, she turned and marched out of the room.
22
EMMA
Now
Emma slept alone and came down the next morning to find a blanket on the couch and no sign of Nathan. A look out the front window showed the carriage house door was open. He’d gotten in at last.
They hadn’t spoken after the argument about the guns, but she’d heard him the night before while she was in bed, loading them into the gun case. They were there this morning. Six rifles, two shotguns, more than a dozen handguns. Seeing them all in the wrong order, on the wrong shelves, made her weirdly twitchy. He’ll know you moved them, she wanted to warn Nathan, and knew it was ridiculous.
They didn’t fight, as a rule, she and Nathan. Emma had listened to her parents fight behind closed doors throughout her childhood; Nathan’s favored screaming at each other in the open. Emma sidestepped the issue by not bringing up a problem until she’d worked out the solution that Nathan would find agreeable. If she couldn’t, she’d let it go.
And she was careful—had been careful—never to be the source of the fight. Nathan was so easy to read, it was a simple enough matter to tell when he was irritated or angry long before the pressure built up enough for him to bring it up to her. She adjusted, bent, experimented until she could tell by the lightening of his mood that she’d found the source of his displeasure.
When had she decided that it was better to be miserable than to be alone, she wondered. Or had that always been the price she was paying?
Her parents had tried so hard to make her small, and she’d fought every moment of it. But for Nathan Gates she’d simply surrendered.
She couldn’t do it anymore. She couldn’t bend one more inch. Not for him.
The kitchen table was covered by a cheap tablecloth, folded in half. The Glock lay disassembled on top, with a cleaning kit half-unpacked next to it. It looked like Nathan had started in on the project and then given up.
Emma sighed. Her father at least had never cleaned guns at the kitchen table or any place where people ate. She gathered up the pieces and carted them to the living room instead, opening a window to let the inevitable fumes out. She set to work—dry brushing the chamber and barrel, wiping it out with solvent and a cloth, brushing again.
It was another several passes before the barrel was clean enough to have passed her father’s inspection, back in the day. There was a meditative quality to the process, and she found herself falling easily back into the rhythm.
With the parts cleaned and lubricated, she assembled the gun, the movements coming back to her fingers before her brain.
“I was going to do that,” Nathan said. She startled. He was standing in the doorway, clothes covered in the dust and grime of the carriage house. “I was going to look up a video later.”
“Well, there are plenty more to clean, if you want to,” she said. She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear, taking a breath to stay calm. “Nathan, I’d like to take these back to the storage unit until we can arrange to have them assessed and sold. I do not feel comfortable with them in the house.”
“Right. You’re a good little liberal who hates guns,” Nathan said, rolling his eyes, and her carefully constructed calm cracked in half.
“Yes, that’s why. It couldn’t be because my parents were murdered with a gun. That I grew up with a dad who thought it was funny to point them at us as a joke,” Emma said, cheeks hot. “Get rid of them. Sell them, have them melted down, I don’t care.”
“If you just want me to get rid of them all, why bother with cleaning it?” he asked.
“Because it was obvious you didn’t know how,” Emma said.
“I told you I was going to watch a video.” He turned and strode out of the room, sparing her from making things any worse. She looked down at her hands, streaked with black and stinking of solvent. It was on her clothes, too, in her hair. She swiped her palm across her already soiled T-shirt, but it wouldn’t scrub clean.