Yet here he was, acting the same way, doing the same thing. Not wanting to, but not being able to avoid it. Ginny had been as angry as he was, and even more hurt, but she was better able to adjust, to roll with the flow, to accommodate change.
He could not do that.
He wished he could.
But he couldn't.
And he stood alone in his office, in the silence, listening to the fading motors of the pickup trucks as his oldest daughter moved out of his house.
3
The mood of the town seemed different, Ginny thought as she drove to the salon. Either something in Juniper had changed during their absence, or her perceptions had been altered by what they'd seen on the trip.
The Store.
It was the last thing they'd seen as they'd left town and the first thing they'd seen on their return.
And it had taken Sam.
If before she had felt that The Store was an intruder in her town, now she felt like the intruder. A transformation had occurred while they'd been on their trip, and now Juniper no longer seemed like her town. It seemed like The Store's town. And she was the unwelcome guest.
She drove down Main. The library, she'd heard, was being privatized.
County funds had been slashed at the last board of supervisors meeting, and since Juniper's library was the smallest and least frequented in the county, the decision had been made to close it. But once again -- of course -- the heroic Store had ridden to the rescue and offered to underwrite the entire operation a proposal that had been gratefully accepted.
The Store now controlled the police department, fire department, all town services, the school district, and the library.
And Sam.
Ginny gripped the steering wheel more tightly. She shared Bill's anger and frustration, but she still saw their daughter as a victim, not an accomplice, and though her gut reaction was to slap the girl and ground her for a month, she realized that Sam was at the age where she had to make her own mistakes.
And learn from them.
She had enough basic faith in her daughter to believe that that would occur.
And she did not want to alienate her and push her away at a time when Sam might need her mother the most.
For things were getting rough out there. She herself was avoided, ostracized, whispered about. Ignored by her friends. The recipient of cold stares from coworkers and giggling derision from old students.
This must be what it felt like to have been a Japanese-American during World War II, she thought, to have been a civil rights activist in Mississippi in the sixties. She was treated not merely as a stranger or an outsider, but as a traitor living among them, as an enemy.
Because she was not a Store sympathizer.
There were plenty of people who weren't, she knew. The displaced workers, the unemployed, all of the people who'd voted against the current council. But they'd been marginalized, shunted off to the side, and they didn't dare express their true feelings. It was as if, overnight, everything had changed, and all of their allies had either gone into hiding or disappeared.
The Store was now organizing Neighborhood Watch groups. Juniper's crime rate over the past two decades had been nearly nonexistent, but suddenly everyone was concerned about drugs and robberies, gang activity and sexual assaults. Now people in one part of town were reporting people from other parts of town who were seen innocently walking through their neighborhoods.
And the police were responding to the calls.
The town was becoming fractured, fragmented, the larger community breaking off into smaller, potentially adversarial groups.
And The Store was reaping the benefits.
Yesterday's issue of the newspaper had a full-page ad for a weekend sale of home security devices.
Ginny pulled into one of the empty parking spaces on the street in front of Hair Today. A bearded, obviously homeless man, wearing torn jeans and a filthy flannel shirt, walked directly in front of her car, and she pretended to look through her purse, waiting until he had gone before getting out of the vehicle.
She was a little intimidated by the vagrants. Most of them simply sat in empty doorways or on raggedy blankets under trees, but the bolder ones staked out specific spots in order to ask passersby for money. She knew she should be more understanding, and in an abstract, intellectual way, she sympathized with their plight, but on an emotional, personal level, she was slightly afraid of these people. She did not like seeing them, was uncomfortable around them, and she did not know how she was supposed to act.
So she tried to avoid them as much as possible.
She was the only customer in the salon, and Rene was the only stylist, and the two of them coexisted in uncomfortable silence while Ginny's hair was washed, then cut and penned. She would have liked to have talked -- about anything -- but Rene was obviously in a bad mood, and Ginny let her be.
Afterward, she left an extra-large tip of ten dollars.
Rene smiled for the first time, touched her hand as she placed the bill on the counter. 'Thank you,' she said. 'For everything.'
Ginny nodded, smiled back.
On the way home, she saw Sam on the sidewalk, heading away from her new house and toward the highway and The Store. She stopped to offer her daughter a ride, but Sam looked at her and gave her a cold smile. 'I don't accept rides from strangers,' she said dismissively.
She kept walking.
'Sam?' Ginny called out the car window. She thought at first that it was some sort of joke, but when her daughter would not look back, continued on at the same even pace, she knew that it was not. 'Samantha!' she called.
No answer.
Ginny moved the car forward, pulling next to her. 'Honey? What's the matter?'
Sam kept walking.
'Get in the car. I don't know what the problem is here, but obviously we need to work it out.'
Sam stopped. 'There's nothing to work out. Fuck off, Mom.'
'What?'
'Fuck. Off.'
Another car drove by, and Samantha flagged down the driver. It was a man, someone Ginny didn't know, and before she could call out, before she could say anything, Sam was in the car and off to The Store.
She thought of following, did for a few blocks, but then she thought better of it and turned back toward home as the other car turned onto the highway.
She made it all the way into the drive before bursting into tears.
4
Shannon stood against the wall with the rest of the employees, legs spread to shoulder width, hands clasped behind her back in the official Store stance.
Mr. Lamb walked slowly back and forth in front of them. 'The new uniforms have arrived,' he said. His voice was low and seductive. 'They are beautiful.'
Shannon felt uneasy. She thought of the trip, of Encantada, of the people in that town all wearing Store uniforms.
Mr. Lamb smiled at her, and she thought of _Sam's bloody panties_.
She looked quickly away, feeling cold and sick.
'You are all going to wear your beautiful new uniforms today. You will wear them proudly. For you are the elite, you are the chosen.'
He walked into the dark doorway of the small stockroom to the left of the elevator and emerged with one of the new uniforms on a hanger. It was leather, black leather, and shiny. Holding the hanger with his left hand, he
