Free A City Called July by Howard Engel

Debbie, Ruth and Nathan rallied long enough to try to make the send-off look like an event. They hugged and kissed the children, tried to make a flourish of it, but they weren’t up to it and the kids didn’t want it.
    “I’ve got to have my bike,” the little girl said with a serious expression. “I need it tomorrow, Mommy.”
    “We’ll see, dear.”
    “I need it.”
    This was my first opportunity to see a fair piece of the family together acting like a family. I watched the aunt and uncle help bundle the kids off in a car with the woman who was later identified as an unmarried cousin of I never did figure out whom.
    With the kids out of the house, a source of tension was removed. Debbie lit a cigarette with her butane lighter, and I cadged a light for a Player’s off the same flame. Rose rattled her empty cup in her saucer as she got up to return the coffee things to the kitchen. “Leave it,” Ruth ordered, but didn’t take any notice of Rose continuing her mission anyway. Nobody said anything except in hoarse whispers. If Larry Geller had been laid out on trestles in front of the fireplace with his hands crossed over his chest, the atmosphere couldn’t have been more funereal. We smoked in silence. Rose returned to her place on the chintz-covered chair behind the coffee-table. Ruth huddled in a narrow occasional chair. Her painted smile was peeling away. Nathan pulled out a rounded stone from between the pillows of the loveseat in front of the windows. When she saw it, Ruth began to cry.
    By now I was feeling like the fifth shoe under a bridal bed. If I’d been looking at this scene through a transom or a keyhole I couldn’t have felt more like a voyeur. The room itself seemed to be crawling away from the patched window. In a way it didn’t seem like the room I’d been in the day before. Somehow a pile of broken glass glinting on broadloom and masking tape on painted woodwork completed the work the mob tried to do. “Safe as houses,” the Welsh say. This house seemed as safe as a circus tent in a hurricane.
    “Your wrist, Nathan. Look!” Debbie crossed to where Nathan’s bare arms had been dangling between his knees as he sat on the edge of the loveseat. He raised first one arm then the other. A twisted line of darkening blood snaked down his long left arm. He raised it like a surgeon scrubbing up, and then began to lick it.
    “Don’t!” Ruth cried, suddenly coming to life. “I’ll get something.” But Debbie was already binding his wrist with a handkerchief.
    “It’s just a scratch,” she said with some colour returning to her face. Nathan looked embarrassed.
    “I hate the sight of blood,” he said “Especially my own.” His bum joke brought a laugh which cracked the mood down the centre.
    “Nathan, you idiot!” Ruth said. “Here we are with the mob at the door and all you can do is make jokes.”
    “Well, the mob’s gone at least. And the house is watertight for tonight. Shouldn’t you get out of here for a few days, Ruth?”
    “What and have every stick of furniture stolen or smashed? Don’t be silly, Nathan. Somebody’s got to stick and stay. It’s my home. If the cops can’t protect the place with people living in it, think of what a mob could do to it empty.”
    “Good point, I guess,” said Nathan. Rose sipped her coffee, which like mine was chilly.
    “Will this find a corner in your report, Mr. Cooperman?” Debbie asked, returning to that annoying note she kept hitting on the first visit.
    “Mrs. Geller, I’m not writing a report. I’m not here to judge you people. I’m here now because Rose Craig and I thought you might need help.”
    “I called the police,” Rose added. Debbie shrugged and slumped into the long couch under a large painting of a woman in a hoop skirt playing a cello beside another at a spinet. The women were lush in their velvets and satins. Debbie Geller was wearing a large shapeless white sweater over blue jeans. All in all, she had a good