Free Stewart and Jean by J. Boyett

commuting.”
    “Oh.... Jean, honey, you’re not letting Kevin’s brother run you off, are you?”
    “Oh, no. No. I just finally miss having a yard, is all.”
    After she got off the phone she went online and started looking for a place, preferably a stand-alone home, one where somebody could walk right up to the front door. As she clicked through the sites of various realtors, looking at the pictures, it came to her that, actually, she really did miss having a yard. Maybe she should even think about getting a mortgage and buying a place, though the idea was kind of freaky. She made some calls and got some appointments to look at places in Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania. Why delay?
    For a second she felt excited about the proposed life-change, the trees and space and all that. Then she remembered what her actual plan was, and it was like all the guts in her lower belly suddenly hardened to solid ice.
    She got a shower and went to Jersey City. Walking to the train she used her smartphone to call up a list of Jersey City gun shops.
    Once at the gun shop, she felt a strange tumult. Though fluorescents, the lights seemed somehow warm. It felt like being back in Arkansas. But that was strange, because even in Arkansas she’d never been in a gun shop. Her family had been one of the few she’d known of growing up that hadn’t kept guns in the house, and she herself had always been more or less against them, and had considered New York’s anti-gun laws one of the perks of living there.
    Even now, looking uncertainly around the gun shop, she was against them. Even that one day in Rogers, she’d been against them as a general principle. If Kevin had paused long enough to challenge her by saying something like, “Oh, I see all of a sudden you’re pro-gun,” she would have denied it. She remembered that when she shot him, she’d been studying Kant’s categorical imperative for a class. According to the categorical imperative, you were supposed to act as if each one of your actions obeyed an ideal universal law. If Jean had believed that the world was a place where practicing the categorical imperative made sense, would do some good, then she supposed she wouldn’t have shot Kevin, or else she would have felt bad about it later. But, regardless of whether or not she personally was or was not predisposed towards seeing the universe through the lens of ethical considerations, there was no denying the fact that this was a world of special cases, and that when push came to shove there was something a little ridiculous about insisting on abstract principles when the stakes were so concrete.
    Really, it was strange how familiar the store felt. If you raised a seagull from the day it hatched in some aviary in a deeply inland zoo, and then one day opened under its beak a sealed bottle filled with sea air, giving the bird a whiff, who knew what would stir inside it. The place had a smell, with a chemical crispness to it. Like a grandmother’s mothballed closet you would sneak your head into sometimes as a kid.
    The guy behind the counter had mutton chops and a soul patch, and a long gray ponytail. His T-shirt was stretched tight over his big belly and tucked into his jeans. “Can I help you?” he asked, looking his cute customer up and down without quite being a dickhead about it.
    Jean went up to the counter and said she was interested in something for home defense. The guy showed her a revolver. The main thing she noticed about it was that it didn’t look like the gun she’d shot Kevin with.
    He was explaining stuff to her about the gun. She said, “Can it shoot through a door?”
    He gave her a funny look, like how cute she was was no longer the primary thing he was thinking about. “Why would you want to shoot through a door?”
    “Like, if someone were trying to break it down.”
    “Depends how thick the door is.”
    She told the guy that right now she was living in Queens, but that she was moving to Pennsylvania really