Inside this little world of mine was furniture inherited from my in-laws. They had a garage full of old stuff after they moved to Anaheim in the seventies. They pushed it on us. We had little money at the time. We accepted it. We never changed it. Even when I was making decent money we never spent much on nice decor. We’d both been raised in simple surroundings, never into ‘stuff’ or the sort of things that hinted at an interest in style. I made decent, but not great money. So too did Agnieska – until she couldn’t work anymore. What savings I had ensured that we could cover ourselves for a while on one income and that Klara got through college without debt. So the house has never had much in the way of improvements. When the plaster began to crack two years ago, I got a decorator friend to hide these fractures with chip paper painted cream. There’s a kitchen with seventeen-year-old appliances. There’s a TV in the living room. Family photos. One from a family outing at Disneyland fifteen years ago when Klara was nine years old and we all looked very happy standing next to a life-sized Donald Duck. There is a crucifix, but I told Agnieska that Sacred Heart lamps and portraits of her favorite saints had no place in the rooms we shared. They cover the walls in her bedroom.

We stopped sleeping together years ago. My bedroom has nothing on the walls. It is simply furnished. A double bed. A chest of drawers. A beat-up mahogany table on which I left tonight (as always) my wallet, money clip, car keys. I needed to sleep but I found myself still wired, still thrown by the day’s events. I got out of my clothes. I put on a pajama bottom and a T-shirt. I went out to the kitchen and opened the refrigerator and took out a bottle of Corona. I unlocked the back door off the kitchen and stepped outside and lit up a cigarette and took several long pulls off the beer. I kept replaying in my mind the moment when that security guard exploded into flames. The victim of an attack by someone who thought he was justified firebombing the personnel of a clinic performing a procedure that was totally legal. But in his mind the doctors and everyone else inside there deserved to be murdered. Because they, in turn, were engaged in the very act of murder.

I sucked down my cigarette. I lit another. I felt a further attack of the shakes coming on. Not just because I couldn’t get that burning security guard out of my head. It was also due to the very subject of abortion – and how it had become my wife’s absolute obsession. What she called ‘the monstrosity of killing an unborn child’.