time. Adults often seemed to lie or exaggerate when it came to things they thought were dangerous for kids to do.
'Ky?'
He looked up to see his dad standing next to him, smiling down at him. He quickly, guiltily, pulled his hand away from the shelf, stepped back, but the rebuke he expected did not materialize. Instead, his dad continued to smile at him. His dad was too tall! He couldn't see the fireworks!
He smiled to himself. That made him happy; that made him feel special.
Most stores arranged things for adults. Even the toys. But here was something just for kids like him, something specifically planned so that adults couldn't see it. It was obvious that the fireworks were put on a shelf this low so that parents wouldn't find out about them. Maybe they were illegal. Or maybe The Store just knew that parents didn't like fireworks. Either way, it was as if a pact had been made between him and The Store, and he vowed not to tell either his mom or his dad about it.
If he'd liked The Store before, he loved it now.
They were partners in this.
His dad's big hand clamped down on his shoulder. 'I roofed this store, Ky.
Did you know that? This entire store. From one side to the other. From front to back.'
He nodded at his dad, pretended to be interested, but his attention remained focused on the fireworks. The cherry bombs, he saw, looked like real cherries, their bodies red, their fuses green, like stems.
He'd never seen anything so cool in his life.
And the best part, the most bitchen part, were the prices posted next to the bar codes on the small ledge below the shelf.
M80s: twenty-five cents.
Cherry bombs: fifteen cents.
Firecrackers: five cents.
Five cents apiece!
If he and his friends put their money together, they could buy tons of them. They could drop them in trash cans, put them in mailboxes, tie them to cats' tails. They could blow up the whole fucking town!
'So how do you like The Store?' his dad asked. 'Isn't it nice?'
Ky grinned up at him. 'It's great,' he said. 'I love it.'
EIGHT
1
Bill had fully intended to boycott The Store, but to his own dismay he found himself going there quite often. He was offended by the way the corporation had bought off town officials, hated the way The Store had bulldozed its way into Juniper, was suspicious of the unexplainable strangeness surrounding its arrival, but he had to admit that The Store had an excellent selection of . . . well, almost everything.
And the fact was, it was much more convenient to shop here in town than drive up to Flagstaff or down to Phoenix.
Still, he always tried to buy whatever he needed at locally owned businesses first. If they didn't have what he was looking for, _then_ he'd check The Store.
But the uneasiness he'd felt, that strange sense of disquiet that had remained with him since he'd seen the first dead deer, seemed to have vanished completely. It was hard to credit animal deaths and mysterious accidents when people were snacking on sushi and drinking espresso in a modern, well-lit, state-of-the-art retail store in which the newest books, CDs, video games, fashions, cosmetics, and household appliances were a mere aisle or two away.
Again, he felt like a traitor to his principles. But even that feeling faded as the days passed, and it was not long before going to The Store was like going to Buy-and-Save or going to Siddons Lumber, something he did easily and naturally, without thinking.
That troubled him when he thought about it.
But he seemed to think about it less and less, and when Ginny said to him one night that Sam wanted to apply for a part-time job at The Store, he did not say that she couldn't.
'You know,' Ginny said, 'she needs to save up some money for college. Even if she gets a scholarship, she'll still need money. And she wants to buy a car, too. She mentioned something about going with you to the auction in Holbrook.'
Ginny had hinted around several times before that Sam wanted to work at The Store, and he'd thought of those people outside The Store's recruiting office, thought of all the weirdness that had been buzzing around the place since it had begun building in Juniper, and he'd automatically vetoed the idea.
But it was hard now to maintain that sense of ominousness. What could happen to his daughter? Especially if she only worked part-time. Other people would always be around, both employees and customers, and it was virtually impossible for him to imagine all of them affected by some bizarre supernatural occurrence.
Supernatural?
Even the thought of it seemed ludicrous.
'The Store lets part-timers work flexible hours,' Ginny added. 'And they pay better than George's or KFC or any of the other places kids in town usually work.'
He looked over at her. 'We'll see,' he said. 'We'll see.'
2
The Store was the talk of the school.
Ginny could not remember when one topic had so dominated all conversations. Local, state, and national elections, wars, international incidents -- nothing had captured the interest of faculty, staff, and students the way The Store had.
It was a sad state of affairs when the opening of a discount retail outlet had more of an effect on people's lives than important world events.
Still, she found herself right in there with the rest of them, talking about the astonishingly new fashions and the amazingly low prices and the vast array of household products now available in town.
'I'm already in debt,' Tracie Welles said at lunch one day when they were talking about how much they'd spent at The Store. 'I'm maxed out on my MasterCard, and I had to put a couple of things on layaway.'
For a brief second, Ginny thought of those black trucks traveling at night, thought about large segments of Juniper's population going into debt to The Store, and a quick chill passed through her.
Then it was gone, and she was laughing with the rest of the teachers in the lounge as they speculated about what their spouses would say when the credit card bills started rolling in.
What really surprised her was Bill's complete reversal on The Store. For months he'd been almost pathologically hostile toward anything even remotely connected to the business. Now, suddenly, all that negativism had disappeared.
It was as if he'd been instantly converted. He'd gone to the grand opening, had seen that there was nothing strange or out of the ordinary, nothing evil or unusual, and all of his reservations had vanished. He went there, he shopped there, sometimes he even just browsed there.
And last night he'd pretty much agreed to let Sam work there.
Miracles never ceased.
After work, Ginny drove past the high school on her way home. It was a bad habit, she knew. And, as her friends told her, she should probably trust her daughters a little more. But she worked at a school; she knew what kids these days were like.
Besides, even good girls did bad things.
That's how Samantha had been conceived.
Ginny didn't regret it. She loved her daughter. But the fact remained that her life would probably have turned out far differently had she not gotten pregnant so young. She would have finished earning her master's degree, for one thing. Might even have gone for a Ph.D. But the responsibilities of motherhood had been thrust upon her, and almost before she knew what had happened, she'd dropped out of college, she and Bill had gotten married, and her plans for the future had been radically redesigned.
She wanted better for her daughters. She wanted them both to finish their educations, to find themselves before they were forced to take on the roles that they would play for the rest of their lives. She did not want them
