by Hughey, J.
“We didn’t plan this. We were watching a movie. And boys aren’t allowed upstairs.” As soon as the words were out of my mouth I got angrier. At almost twenty years old, I’d been scooped from the freedom of the ocean and returned to my nursery aquarium. “Never mind,” I bit out. “I’m sure Boone Ramer won’t put a hand on me here or anywhere else, ever, day or night.”
Mom tried to soothe me. “Sweetie, I doubt —″ The house phone jangled, making us both jump. Dad had dug out an old fashioned wired set that would still work without electricity. Its strident ringer insisted on immediate attention. Mom sighed as she walked to it.
“Hello? Oh, hi, Herb.”
My mom called her in-laws by their first names, Herb and Bittie, a nickname for Betsy.
“What happened?” she asked sharply. “Well, is she all right?”
I rose to go to her. The guest room door creaked open, too. “Okay, I’m on my way, and Violet and Boone. We’ll be right there. Get her to stay in the living room, and we’ll clean up when we get there.”
Mom explained in a rush as I pulled on my sneakers and Boone laced up his hikers. “Grandma canned some tomatoes this morning, but she must have fallen asleep during the last batch. Herb says she hasn’t been sleeping well, so she took quite a nap. The canner bath must have boiled off all the water and a jar of the tomatoes exploded. He said it sounded like a bomb, even from the garage. Grandma ran into the kitchen and cut her foot. It won’t stop bleeding.”
When we hurried into their living room, an obvious fact smacked me in the face. My grandparents were old. For my whole life, they’d aged in lockstep with my growing up, so I’d never thought of them as looking old. They just were. Until today. Poor Grandma sat with her veiny foot on a bloody bath towel, ankle swollen, yellow toenails curved into dry skin. Bimonthly permanents on rollers the size of toothpicks forced her hair into painfully tight curls all over her head. Overall, uncharacteristic weariness combined with gravity to tug her cheeks into sagging folds.
She avoided our eyes like a chastised child. Grampa hovered over her, wielding a roll of white gauze in one hand and a brown bottle of hydrogen peroxide in the other.
“Everything’s fine,” Grandma said. “We can take care of it. I don’t know why Herb dragged you down here.”
“It’s no trouble, Bittie,” Mom said. “Violet, why don’t you and Boone go see what’s what in the kitchen?”
I was guiltily happy to escape Grandma’s resistant helplessness, though less so when I saw the disaster, with horror movie tomato gore splattered on half the room. Shards of glass sparkled amidst the red.
Mom’s calm questions interjected with Grandma’s resentful responses in the living room. Grampa came up behind us.
“She says to use the old mop, not the good mop, and there are old rags in the laundry room, and to wrap the glass good and tight so it doesn’t cut through the garbage bag.” A thin sheen of sweat covered Grampa’s upper lip.
“Will do.” I hoped my all-business attitude would help him through this.
Grampa pointed out all the supplies with a shaky hand before I urged him into his recliner. Mom already had Grandma’s foot wrapped into a bulky white ball. She sat on the couch chatting with her.
When I returned to the kitchen, I told Boone I’d clean the stove and ceiling, since they seemed to be the worst.
Boone nodded.
I wiped the top of the stove so I could warm some water. Inside the canning pot waited a mafia meal gone horribly wrong. Tomatoes, whole and exploded, mingled with wrist-slitting fangs of glass. Three of the jars survived the blast. They stood like ancient immortals holding their bulbous cargo in a polluted sea.
Boone gathered glass and tomato guts in a cardboard box. I tackled the unenviable job of scrubbing the ceiling while he mopped.
My neck soon cramped at the awkward angle. “Life with the Perches gets better for you every minute,” I joked.
He smiled politely.
The vinyl floor revived to normal and the teakettle wallpaper hid the worst of the stains, but the creamy ceiling would sport pink clouds like a Dr. Seuss landscape until it was repainted.
With the kitchen as restored as possible and dinnertime upon us, Mom tried to convince Grandma and Grampa to come home with us for the night. Grandma flat out refused. She promised she would keep her foot up on the ottoman and call Mom if it started to bleed or bothered her at all.
“Violet,” Grandma said. “I’ve got a dozen chickens ordered for next Thursday. Mabel said if we help pluck and clean them she’ll charge a little less. Good lesson for a girl like you. And Sara, too. Thursday.”
I bathed as best I could with water I’d heated on the old camping stove Grampa had loaned us then flopped on my bed with a candle flickering on my nightstand. Boone had maintained a hushed five-foot perimeter since our discovery. I wanted to close the distance between us again, and not just in the physical sense. I wanted him to talk to me, but every sentence this evening rang with the politeness of a store clerk to a new customer.
A soft knock tapped on my door. “Come in.”
Mom eased into the room, her candle’s flame accentuating the laugh lines at the corners of her mouth. “What a day, huh?” She sat sideways at the foot of the bed. “Dad called. The company wants this x-ray sale so bad they’re delivering the equipment tomorrow. He’s going to stay down there. He couldn’t find a hotel. The doctor is letting him sleep in the waiting room.” She rubbed at one eye and laughed. “He says they have power, and the water is on from 8AM to 8PM. Seems like a good system, doesn’t it?”
“Better than trying to wash your hair in a sink,” I said. “Did you tell him about Grandma?”
She nodded. “He’s worried. We knew the time was coming when they wouldn’t be able to stay alone but, well, I guess no one expects independence to end today.”
“Grandma won’t like the sound of that.”
“No, she won’t. Maybe she’ll listen to your dad. It makes more sense to have everybody in one household where we can share resources. And for protection. All the looting….” Her voice drifted to silence as we both imagined a mob beating down our door.
My shoulders slumped. “They’ll need the downstairs bedroom,” I said. I dreaded the excuse their moving in would give Boone to leave.
“Yes,” she admitted, reaching out to touch my foot. “If it comes to that, we’ll figure something out, Violet. About this afternoon —″
“Aw, Mom, I don’t want to talk about that again.”
She paused, and I thought, for once, she might actually shut up. Wrong.
“It’s important to me you understand. I meant what I said. I realize if you were at college, you’d have the freedom to do what you think is best for you.” She focused on my eyes. I knew she was trying to make an impression on me with her words, and that, if I wanted to be treated like an adult, I had to be able to handle an adult conversation. “I trust you to make good choices. You’re sensible, and Boone seems a level-headed guy. Heck, I met Matt Perch when I wasn’t much older than you so I know this—whatever you’re discovering with Boone—has the potential to be a real, lifelong relationship for you.”
“Okay,” I said.
“However…”
I groaned.
“…you need to use protection.”
“Mom.”
“Look at how much our lives have changed since Yellowstone started. We have no idea what this winter, or the next year, or the next decade is going to bring. As willing as you and Boone seem to be to meet the challenge, believe me when I say you don’t want an infant in this situation, especially by accident.”
“I’m sure it won’t be an issue. He probably won’t even hold my hand after today.”
She rolled her eyes. “If a little interruption sets him back that far then you’re better off without him.”
“Easy for you to say. I’ve been trying to date him for a year, and when things start to go well, a freaking apocalypse happens. He’s already wo
rried about obeying the household rules, half of which he’s making up for himself, and then we get caught making out like two kids.”
She patted my foot again. “I talked to him a little while ago. We’re cool,” she said.
“Omigod!” I clapped my hands over my face. “Omigod! What did you say?”
“I told him pretty much what I told you. Oh, and that the condoms are stored under my bathroom sink.”
She kept talking about how many condoms she had and where she’d bought them and why she hid them instead of displaying them in the dining room but I was pretty much stroking out. I’d never before lost the power of speech. I was not a goldfish in an aquarium, I was a goldfish in a Baggie, gasping for oxygen in stale, poopy water, getting carried and shaken and killed minute by excruciating minute at an elementary school fun night.
It shouldn’t be physically possible to swallow my tongue and puke at the same time, yet my body did its darnedest to test the hypothesis.
“Why do you look so shocked?” Mom asked, finally noticing her first-born child about to go into a seizure.
“Seriously? We are having this conversation, and then you tell me you also had it with the guy I like. You told him where to find your condoms, and then you ask me why I look shocked?”
“I’ve always been a realist, Violet. I’ve never shielded you and Sara from bad news or banned books or any of that stuff. This is life. Your life. I always want you to be prepared with the information you need to make good decisions. I know it seems personal, but this conversation is about making good decisions, because you’re getting old enough, and our situation could get strange enough, you might bear a lot of responsibility if you make bad ones.”
I sighed. “Okay, Mom. Great. I got it.” I reached out to give her a hug. No matter if the topic mortified me, in the big picture, my ever-involved mother expected me to make my own choices and live with them, which bordered on revolutionary.
“How was Boone when you talked to him?” I asked, not too proud to get info in whatever way I could.
“Polite. He apologized again.”
“Do you think I should go down?” I asked. The bedrock beneath Indiana might be shifting as profoundly as Yellowstone’s if I was asking my mom for advice.
“Hmm,” she hummed. “I’d probably wait until tomorrow morning. I think the Perch family has about worn him out today.”
My phone chirped in the middle of the night. Charging. The faint whir of ceramic heaters sighed through the house. Why ceramic heaters? Mom wanted to save the fuel oil and firewood, so the electric heaters stood poised to run at every opportunity. I met her, bleary eyed, in the laundry room and sent her back to bed. I loaded up enough dirty towels to make the washer groan.
I flopped onto the couch—the scene of the interruptus—ready to swap loads every hour, on the hour.
Text to Mia:
I showered before sunrise, after the water heater’d had a few hours to work its magic. Tranquil with the steam of the shower and the warmth of the house, I returned to the couch with a cup of hot coffee made the easy way—in the drip coffee maker. The morning newsreel showed a cluster of fat silver pipes jutting out of the ground then running parallel to a blue metal building.
I heard Boone in the kitchen but decided not to pounce on him. He came out with a steaming mug to sit with a definite buffer between us.
The broadcaster warned to expect rolling blackouts for the foreseeable future, and not only from weaknesses in the grid. Forty percent of electricity generated came from coal-powered plants, and forty percent of the coal came from—or used to come from—Wyoming. The second most commonly used fuel, natural gas, fared a little better with the top producers being Texas and Louisiana. Ironically, power outages interrupted the flow of gas. Some stations generated their own electricity with generators fueled by the natural gas itself.
“Shouldn’t have taken a genius to figure that out,” I commented during a commercial. I blew on my lukewarm coffee.
“We Americans have felt invincible for a long time,” he said.
“Speaking of invincible, I’ve been meaning to ask about Cramer. Have you heard anything from him since we left school?” I asked, hoping to ease back into normalcy with some small talk.
Boone rubbed one of his eyes sleepily. “Umm, his dad showed up at his apartment last week and made him come home. I don’t think he put up much of a fight. He’d run out of easy mac.”
“No diploma?”
“I think we’re all pretty much out of luck on that front.”
An advertisement for a greenhouse kit blared from the TV at twice the volume of the normal program. “Hey, look. We could be marketing what Mom put in the front yard.”
He sipped at his java.
I swallowed hard. “I’m sorry about her walking in yesterday. And then coming to talk to you about it. That was probably even worse.”
He turned his head, finally willing to look at me. His hair pressed flat where he’d slept on it, and the wrinkle of a pillowcase indented his cheek. “Let’s sort of…forget about it, if we can. Starting at the point where she walked in, I mean. I wish I could burn that moment out of my head with a cattle prod. I’ll keep remembering the earlier part, though.”
A bubble of happiness rose up in me. “Sounds like a good plan. I’m good with the cattle prod plan.”
He nodded. His grim expression told me he hadn’t forgotten any of it.
The news came back on with video footage of a hundred-car pileup on Route 80 in Iowa. Boone leaned forward. All the cars looked the same, bent hulks of metal dusted with ash. I scooted across the couch to put my hand on his back.
“I’m sure they’re fine,” I whispered. “They should already be at the cousin’s house, right?”
“Yes, but they haven’t called like Mom promised. The phone at the number they gave me gives a busy signal.”
Mom checked on Grandma and Grampa in the morning then cooked a pile of food while our oven and stove worked. Sara and I kept the laundry going and half-heartedly cleaned the gritty floors. Boone worked on the solar power project.
We’d settled in to a luscious lunch of steaming creamy tomato soup and grilled cheese when Mom muttered, “Who in the world is that?” A pickup truck stopped on the driveway near the big spring. A middle-aged man and a woman climbed out and made no secret of their interest in the stream of water.
“Mrs. Perch, I’m going to go get something out of my closet.”
“I’m sure they don’t mean any harm.”
“I’m sure they don’t,” Boone said.
Mom patted her mouth with her napkin and headed for the front door. Sara and I looked at each other then bolted after her.
The couple stood at the truck, now looking toward us with lowered chins. “Hi there. We’re Bob and Vicky Trenton,” the middle-aged man offered with a tentative smile. His legs bowed like he’d been a cowboy before arriving in rural Indiana. “We live down closer to Gardenburg but far enough out that we’re still on a well. Our power hasn’t come back on like yours and we’re out of water.”
Bob cocked his head to one side as Boone strolled up next to Mom and all but directly in front of me. “Hello.” Bob wiped his hands on dark jeans with a white line down the center of the leg, presumably from a long history of ironing, juxtaposed with a hint of grunge from needing to be laundered. “We tried the river water but there’s cows upstream. My cousin remembered there were springs up here and I wondered if we could fill up our jugs. We won’t be any trouble.”
“Of course you can,” Mom said. “Take it right out of the pipe there. You should still add a little chlorine or boil it or something.” She smacked her hands to her cheeks then winced from the pressure on her forgotten root canal. “What am I thinking? You could use the garden hose since the power is on.”
“The spring will be fine. Thank you….”
“Candy. Candy Perch. This is Boone, a friend of ours from out of town, and my daughters, Violet and Sara. Girls, maybe we
can give them a hand. My, you do have quite a few jugs,” she said when they started unloading from the bed of the truck.
“Mrs. Perch,” Boone muttered. “Do you know these people?”
“No,” she said, “but they’re asking for water, not the Crown Jewels.”
We chatted with the Trentons and made quick work of the containers as the friendly couple described the assortment of animals they kept on their farmette. All needed water. Boone tracked them like a guard dog while he helped.
Mom stood with her hands on her hips to watch the white tailgate of the pickup disappear down the slope of our drive. “They seem like good people,” she said.
Dad pulled in at dusk. Mom, who’d been lurking near windows at the front of the house, ran out the door as if he’d been gone a week instead of one night. “Glad to see the porch light on,” he said as he gave her a big hug and a loud, smacking kiss. “Selling the x-ray machine should keep it on a little longer. I stopped down at Dad’s house real quick. They were about like I expected. Wow,” he said, turning to see Sara and me and Boone all surrounding him. “I don’t usually get this big a welcoming committee.” He pointed at the solar panel. “That thing charging yet?”
“Yes, sir,” Boone said. “Not much sun today, but we might be able to test the charge tomorrow.”
Dad sighed. “Tomorrow we’re going to move my parents up here.”
“Why?” Sara asked. “The power is back on.”
“Well, shortcake, they aren’t as spry as they used to be. Plus, there’s people starting to get a little desperate. I’d feel better with all of us together, under one roof.”
“Two people showed up here for water today,” Sara said.
Mom rolled her eyes. “They were so appreciative. Boone didn’t trust them, but I could tell they were good people.”
“How did they know we had springs?”
“The man said his cousin knew.”
“Huh. Our springs must be famous,” he said. “No mail in the box. Did you get it already?”