Once upon a time, before Sammy was born, Molly had been warm-blooded and tangible, but lately she seemed watered down. Haunting the halls of their home instead of living in them. She was a remarkable woman in that way: even with the family drugstore doing well enough that she didn’t have to work, three beautiful children and the support of her faith, she could still find something to be sad about.
Molly opened the shower screen an inch to peer out. Her shoulders were pinched with gooseflesh. ‘Come on, hun. I’m freezing here.’
‘I’m going, I’m going,’ he said, stepping out into the hall and closing the door behind him.
He found two of his children downstairs in front of the television, engrossed in an episode of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Neither said good morning. Stu, the lumpy nine-year-old, was getting over a cold. He sat under a woollen blanket with a box of Kleenex, staring at the screen with eyes wide and mouth slack.
‘Feeling any better, buddy?’ Jack asked, placing the back of his hand against Stu’s forehead. He didn’t reply. The Turtles had him transfixed.
Sammy, the two-year-old cherub, was also watching, but she seemed just as interested in her big brother. Her eyes darted from the cartoon to Stu’s face. When Michelangelo made a wisecrack and Stu laughed, she copied him, parroting not just the volume of the laugh, but the rhythm too. When Shredder put some sinister plan into action and Stu gasped, Sammy gasped with him.
Not wanting to disturb the scene of domestic bliss he’d stumbled into, Jack backed quietly out of the room.
His eldest daughter, Emma, was eating cornflakes at the kitchen counter, one arm forming a wall around her bowl, the way he imagined prison inmates would eat.
Is that how she sees this house? He wondered. A sentence she needs to wait out. Sometimes it felt that way for Jack too.
‘Good morning, sweetheart,’ he said, making coffee. ‘Coach Harris came by the drugstore yesterday. He says you had PMS again so you couldn’t participate in gym. Need me to bring you home some naproxen?’
Emma grunted. ‘I don’t know why two grown men think it’s okay to talk about my period.’
‘Isn’t using your period to get out of gym sort of cliché?’
‘It’s not cliché, Dad – it’s a classic. Besides, Coach Harris is a creep. He always makes us climb the gym ropes so he can “spot” us. That reminds me, I need you to sign this.’
She dug deep into her backpack, pulled out a permission slip and handed it to Jack.
‘For permission to participate in the study of science and evolution?’ he read. ‘You need a parent’s permission to take a class nowadays?’
‘You do when half the kids are fucking fundies.’
He lowered his voice. ‘Has your mother seen this?’
‘No.’
He took a pen from his breast pocket and signed the permission slip quickly. ‘Let’s keep it that way. And don’t let her catch you saying the F-word.’
‘Fucking?’
‘Fundie.’
Emma folded the slip and tucked it safely back into her backpack.
While both Jack and Molly were technically members of the Church of the Light Within – Molly through conversion and Jack through blood – Molly took it far more seriously than he did. She attended all three weekly services. That was common for members who found the faith later in life: usually they already had a hole that needed filling.
Jack had started drifting from the Light Within as a teenager and had stopped attending services altogether when Emma was born. He’d justified it by calling it a safety issue: like many Pentecostal fundamentalists, the Light Within handled venomous snakes and ingested different kinds of poison as part of their worship – not exactly a healthy environment for children. So he had stayed home to babysit and let Molly do her thing. He still called himself a Light Withiner to keep Molly from leaving him and his parents from disowning him – although at times neither of those possibilities sounded too bad – but in truth he had long ago lost his faith.
Molly came downstairs, pulling on her pastel-pink sweater. ‘Morning, Em.’
Emma grunted a reply.
‘Coach Harris told your father you’re using PMS to get out of gym. Is this true?’
‘Dad’s already given me the lecture, so you can cool it.’
‘Well, I hope he told you that lying is a sin and your studies are the most important thing in your life right now.’
‘Jesus, here we go.’
‘Em.’ Molly drummed her fist on the kitchen counter. ‘Each tree is recognised by its own fruit. The mouth speaks what the heart is full of. When you say His name in vain—’
‘—you dishonour the faith,’ Emma finished in a tired monotone. ‘Words testify to our devotion to God and words are the truth of what we are. I got it. Thanks.’ She put her bowl in the sink. ‘I have to go. I’m meeting Shelley.’
She picked up her backpack, clomped across the kitchen in her dirty Chuck Taylors and disappeared out the door.
‘Some back-up would have been nice,’ Molly said to Jack.
‘I thought you handled it pretty well.’ He put an arm around her shoulders and tried to ignore the way she stiffened under his touch.
‘I worry about her, Jack.’
‘She’s not a lost soul just yet,’ he said. ‘Just a little lost. Remember what you were like at her age? Besides, I won’t be the favourite for long. I read somewhere that when girls hit puberty something is triggered inside their brain and they’re reprogrammed to hate the smell of their father. They say it’s an evolutionary thing. To prevent incest.’
Molly’s face turned sour. ‘Just one more reason not to believe in evolution.’
Sammy yanked on one of Jack’s pant legs. She had waddled into the kitchen, dragging a stuffed gorilla behind her. ‘Dada,’ she said. ‘Incest?’
Molly laughed. It felt good to hear her laugh. ‘Good luck with that one. I have to check up on Stu.’
When Molly left the kitchen, Jack hoisted his little girl into his arms and drew her tight toward his face. His whiskers and hot breath made her giggle and squirm. She smelled like fresh talcum powder.
‘Incest?’ Sammy said again.
‘Insects,’ Jack said. ‘You know, like ants and beetles.’
Went Drugs, the family business, was situated on the corner of Main Street and Barkly, in the middle of Manson’s shopping district. The store also provided a shortcut between a large parking lot and Main Street, which meant plenty of foot traffic. People always got sick and business was always good.
When Jack arrived, Deborah Shoshlefski was bagging up a customer’s order at the front counter. Deborah was the youngest and most reliable of Jack’s shop assistants, a dowdy girl with wide-set eyes that made her seem perpetually surprised.
‘Morning, boss. There’s a load of scripts need filling. They’re on your spike.’
‘Thanks, Debbie.’
She rolled her eyes, laughing, and told her customer, ‘He knows I hate it when people call me Debbie, so he calls me Debbie every chance he gets.’
Jack smiled politely at the woman as he slipped behind the counter. He barely had time to button on his white tunic before a skeletal hand reached over the counter and grabbed his forearm.
‘My joints are hurting something awful, Jack,’ an old voice