You Can't Go Home Again

In fact, Ron didn't think much about Don Annas. He was watching Sylvia and dreaming dreams. He pissed her off by making a play for her, and Jip had to soothe her down.

"Stumpy hits on every woman he sees, if he likes their looks," he explained. "This just means you look good! I already told ya that! He can take no; he'll keep lookin' but he won't bother ya again."

And sure enough, he had done just that, and Sylvia steadied down and took some decent photos. She stood on the roof peak and took a few looking down on St. Joseph's Hospital, practically across the street. In the end, those were the only ones to make her money.

Magowan had a bombshell for Don, come midafternoon. He went directly home, by bus, so that he arrived afoot.

His father was in the bed upstairs and Beverly was dressed for sex. They'd heard him on the front hall stairs, but there was no time to fake innocence. He was annoyed, but he had larger issues to bring up at that point.

"You get the fuck out of this house!" was the way he started in.

Everybody talked at once, of course, but he shouted them down. "I'd say, go now, because I'm calling the police and the ambulance!"

He spun on his heel and left his naked father and a very panicked woman in stockings to expostulate to thin air.

Beverly pointed after him and told Don to stop him, and reason with him. It got the old fart out of the room. She gathered her cash and her jewelry, got a pair of jeans on, and went directly to the TR3, brushing past the hollering men in the kitchen without a backward glance. She knew a head start when she saw one, and this was no time to pack a bag.

Gil hadn't been in time to stop the call to the police, but he wasn't brooking insubordination. While Don was dialing the ambulance service, Gil plucked a heavy knife from the magnet on the wall and bashed the end of the handle into his son's temple. Down he went, catching his chin on the counter. He sprawled across the linoleum, blood from his bitten tongue welling from his mouth.

"Gil! Gilman Annas! What are you--?" These were Penny's last words.

The naked man with the big knife whirled around at the sound of his name to see his wife hit the rug and bounce gently, to see the oxygen tube she'd been tethered to roll to a stop against her hip, to see the spark from the outlet in the bedroom ignite the curtains, and to see the amazingly rapid spread of flame up the curtains and the bedspread.

Oxygen feeds flame, and six liters a minute is a significant flow. The windows had been closed for months in the room. His weapons, his black powder, his ammunition were in there!

He rushed to Penny, and ripped the mask tubing away from her neck by the orange light of the mounting wall of flame. He took her thin shoulders and dragged her to the kitchen before the first explosion blew the windows out of the front corner of the house.

She was dead by the time the ambulances arrived, killed by a blow to the head from the valve of the long green tube. She'd pulled it over when she'd leapt up to stop her husband and son from fighting. If Penny hadn't eased up the medication levels so she'd eat, she'd likely have slept through the whole thing.

Don attended her funeral with his father, who was being guarded by county employees. Jip and Sylvia were there, too. He stayed with them overnight, and went with Sylvia the next day when she returned to Monhegan.

After all, he needed a mother.