It was from Colin. Louise ground her teeth loud enough to make any dentist who heard her sure he’d be sending his kids to Harvard. Just what she needed right now! She almost deleted it without listening to it. Almost, but not quite. Shaking her head, she held the phone to her ear.
“Hello, Louise,” the familiar, once-loved voice said. “Wanted to let you know we found out for sure: Kelly’s pregnant. Sorry, but I’m afraid that means I won’t be able to keep sending you little bits and pieces for your kid any more. Way things are, and the way our bills will shoot through the roof, we’re gonna have to hang on to every nickel we’ve got. The ramen place doesn’t pay too bad, I bet, so you’ll be fine as long as you kinda watch it. Well, take care. ’Bye.”
“You son of a bitch!” Louise snarled. “You fucking son of a bitch!” That was what Colin was, all right. With a few quick, savage pokes, she did scrub the message. But she couldn’t get it out of her head so easily. You’ll be fine as long as you kinda watch it. Watch what? She had exactly nothing to watch now, here or from her ex-husband.
How long could she make nothing last? How much severance would she get? How soon could she start collecting unemployment? How much would it be? She had no idea. She’d have to find out, though, and in a hurry. She didn’t even know where the closest unemployment office was.
Well, as long as this crappy joint had power, she could Google that and find out. What would Mr. Nobashi do if he caught her? Fire her? Laughing a wild laugh, she hustled back to her computer.
XIII
Kelly broke a couple of eggs into a measuring cup. They were going to go into a meatloaf; the store had had ground beef for the first time in quite a while.
They sat there side by side in the bottom of the Pyrex cup. To Kelly, it looked as if they were two big, baleful eyes staring up at her. She gulped. Then she did more than gulp. She ran for the bathroom. She made it in the nick of time.
Scope got rid of some of the revolting taste—some, but not enough. The horrible stuff had gone up her nose. That meant she would keep tasting it all night. They called it morning sickness, but they lied. They did for her, at least. She could toss her cookies any old time. She’d found out more about vomiting these past few weeks than she’d ever known before.
Colin walked in just as she was lying down on the couch. “Don’t kiss me!” she warned. All the Scope in the world wouldn’t be enough to make him happy if he did.
“What happened?” he asked. Not What’s the matter?—he didn’t need to be a cop to figure out what was up with that.
She pointed feebly toward the kitchen. “The eggs. They were looking at me. You want dinner, you make it.”
“Okay,” he said, and did. The meatloaf came out ever so slightly scorched on the bottom and blander than she would have fixed it, but it was plenty edible. Colin cooked well enough. He’d never be great; neither his skills nor his repertoire reached far enough for that.
At the moment, Kelly wouldn’t fuss. She was just glad the meat loaf seemed inclined to stay down. Maybe the blandness even helped.
“Better now?” Colin asked.
“Uh-huh.” She nodded. “Thanks. You never can tell when it’ll get me. I sure can’t, anyway.”
She washed the dishes. After Colin had cooked supper, that seemed only fair. Marshall was out doing something with his friends. What and with whom, she didn’t know. Marshall was an adult, and she didn’t pry. Whatever it was, she hoped it didn’t involve too much money. Colin’s ex had fired her son right after ramen headquarters shuttered. If she had to stay home herself, she saw no point in paying him. Which made sense, but making sense didn’t mean it did Marshall any good.
Colin was not happy to have his younger son out of work. Kelly tried to soften it: “Times are tough everywhere. It’s not like he’s the only one.”
“I know,” Colin growled, “but he’s the only one here.”
“He’s still writing,” Kelly said.
“He sure isn’t selling much,” Colin answered, which was also true. Kelly had learned to recognize the SASEs Marshall included with his manuscripts when they came back. Every time her stepson picked one up, he looked disgusted. But he kept sending his stories out over and over, by snailmail and e-mail. If anything would let him escape from his current dead end, they were it.
But would anything? Marshall didn’t want anyone but editors looking at what he wrote. Again, Kelly didn’t pry. She wouldn’t have wanted anyone prying into what she was up to if she were in Marshall’s Nikes, either—do unto others and all that good stuff.
“He’s gonna need to get himself a real job now, a job job.” Colin paused, then tempered that ever so slightly: “Or at least find another kid who needs babysitting.”
“But—” Kelly left it right there, because she didn’t know where else she could go with it. It wasn’t that there were no real jobs; some work still got done in spite of everything that had happened to the country. Damn few new ones turned up, though, and next to none of the ones that did were for kids just out of college with a degree in creative writing.
As for babysitting, the only reason Marshall had done so much of that was that James Henry Ferguson was his half-brother. Sure, Louise would give him a good reference, but so what? Rug rat minder wasn’t his chosen career path.
Which wasn’t the only complication. If Colin felt like locking horns with his son, Kelly didn’t know what she should do. Play peacemaker? Stand clear and let them go at it? Whatever she did or didn’t do, she saw ways to wind up in trouble with the greatest of ease. That was one part of marrying somebody with grown kids she hadn’t thought about enough.
Colin chuckled. It wasn’t a cheerful chuckle: more the sort he might have given after spotting the driver’s license that dumbass bank robber left behind. “If he doesn’t find anything in the next few months, he can start making money taking care of his legitimate half-sib.”
“That’s true.” Kelly knew she sounded surprised. She hadn’t looked so far ahead. She would have bet Marshall hadn’t, either. She added, “Don’t rub his nose in it right now, please. It’s not what he wants to do.”
“I know,” Colin said. “But you do what you’ve got to do, not what you want to do. A lot of people haven’t figured that one out yet, even with the supervolcano yelling in their faces. They still try and do whatever they want, and then they get mad when it doesn’t work the way it used to.”
“Yup.” Kelly nodded. “I wonder what I’d be doing if my chairman didn’t know the head of the geology department at Dominguez.”
“You’d’ve made it,” Colin said with great certainty. “You’re the kind who does. You wouldn’t’ve stuck it out for your thesis and your degree and everything if you weren’t the kind of person who tended to business. You wouldn’t’ve been out there in the cold with your darn seismograph for me to make a jerk of myself over if you didn’t take care of business.” This time, his chuckle was self-conscious—not the kind of noise he usually made.
“Best chilly morning in Yellowstone I ever had,” Kelly answered. That made him smile. He needed reassurance he was okay with women in general and with her in particular. Having Louise dump him that way left him more deeply scarred than he showed anybody but her. Chances were it left him more deeply scarred than he wanted to show himself.
Reading by candlelight was possible, but it left a lot to be desired. They went up to bed before too long. Marshall hadn’t come in yet. Kelly figured he eventually would, and she was right. She had to get up to pee in the middle of the night. The power’d come back on, too. She saw light around the edges of Marshall’s door and heard him clicking away at the Mac.
Even if it cost her a reliable babysitter, she hoped he made it as a writer. Yes, you did what you had to do. Colin was dead right about that. But if what you had to do could also be what you wanted to do, you were looking at something as close to
happiness as you were likely to find in this old world.
She went back to bed. She fell asleep again as soon as her head hit the pillow. That was one more thing the baby was doing to her. She would have liked it better if she didn’t have so much trouble getting started in the morning. Coffee tasted so horrible she couldn’t stomach it. That was Junior’s fault, too. She would have been grumpier if she’d stayed awake longer.
* * *
Bryce Miller had got his share of rejection slips for things he’d written. He was resigned to that. When you wrote poems modeled after ancient Greek efforts from poets long dead by the time of Christ, you needed to get used to rejection.
But he was getting different rejections these days. He kept sending out poems. And he also kept sending out applications to every college and university that had a job opening even faintly related to the kinds of things he could do. Some of them just ignored him. Others cared enough to tell him they wanted nothing to do with him. It was a compliment . . . of sorts. He would have liked a compliment of the sort that came with paychecks attached.
It wasn’t that he hated what he was doing at Junipero High. He could still have been back at the DWP, for instance—now, that had been a crazy-making job, at least for him. He felt all throttled back, though. He was teaching so many classes and so many kids that he had no time or energy for anything that looked like scholarship. He also got tired of teaching nothing but the basics of what he knew. Sure, that was what high school was all about. He understood the problem. He got tired just the same.
So he cast his curriculum vitae upon the waters and waited to see what he would find after God knew how many days. The institutions of higher learning that did deign to answer—a bit more than half—were politely apologetic. No, they were politely hopeless. They had no openings. They were contracting, not expanding. They’d been contracting even before the supervolcano made classics and history seem even less relevant than they had back in the good times.
“At least I can do most of this by e-mail when the power’s on,” he told Susan. “It doesn’t cost me as much in postage as it would have thirty years ago.” He grinned crookedly. “And the ones who do answer tell me no a fuck of a lot faster than they could’ve in the old days.”
“Funny, Bryce. Har-dee-har-har. See? I’m laughing.” She was just finishing her own dissertation. She knew everything there was to know about Frederick II, the Holy Roman Emperor who was called Stupor Mundi: the stunner of the world. The world, unfortunately, had a new stunner now. Her chances for landing an academic job might have been better than Bryce’s, but that sure didn’t make them good.
“Hey, you’ll do it, whether I manage or not. I can be your kept man,” Bryce said.
“Right. Whatever you’re smoking, let me have some, too,” she answered. “I wonder if your high school needs two Latin teachers who can do world history, too.” Before he could say anything, she quickly added, “Yes, I’m kidding. You’re lucky Junipero needs one person in that slot.”
“Lucky. Uh-huh.” But Bryce didn’t push it. As things went these days, he was lucky. He had work. As long as he stayed careful and lucky, it let him pay the rent, eat, and put aside a widow’s mite for the day after tomorrow. If Susan added even a little something to the pot after they got married, they’d . . . kinda get along.
Maybe things would come back to normal by the time they hit middle age. Geologists and climatologists were still hashing that out. Bryce got distant, possibly distorted echoes of the argument from Colin: Kelly was one of the people doing the arguing. Right now the answer seemed to be Nobody knows for sure, but it doesn’t look so good. Or so hot, if your taste ran to old-fashioned slang and bad puns.
“It’s not fair!” Susan burst out.
Bryce nodded. “Nope. It’s not. But I don’t know what to do about it, hon. Fair or not, we’re stuck with it.”
“Shit,” she said. “When Rome fell, it fell an inch at a time, and the Romans kicked and bit and clawed as hard as they could. Mother Nature didn’t whack ’em upside the head with a shillelagh.”
“And you’re not even Irish,” he said. She made as if to whack him upside the head. Luckily, she wasn’t carrying a concealed shillelagh.
Two days later, Bryce looked forward to getting back to his apartment and pouring down a beer. Trying to explain the ablative absolute was as foredoomed as the charge of the Light Brigade. High school kids just didn’t get a language that used cases, not prepositions and word order, for its special effects—and the ablative absolute was some of Latin’s Pixar splendor.
He’d explained till he was blue in the face, but they didn’t see it. Well, Olga Smyslovsky—Sasha’s younger sister—did, but she spoke a language with more cases than Latin when she went home from school. Like Sasha, she had trouble with Latin vocabulary, but the grammar was a piece of cake for her. Nice to know it was for somebody.
Bryce wondered why he bothered opening his mailbox. He didn’t expect any bills. Junk mail was way down since the eruption. Paper was scarce and expensive, and so was everything else. Businesses hunkered down, the same as the people who mostly didn’t patronize them.
“What’s this?” he wondered out loud, plucking an envelope from the box. It was from Wayne State. Wayne State, he read on the printed return address, was in Wayne, Nebraska. One more “Screw you very much for your interest” letter, Bryce thought. He was damned if he remembered sending any kind of application to Wayne State. Maybe it was a preventive rejection—don’t you dare try to land a job with us! Were there such things? He wouldn’t have been surprised, not even a little bit.
He took it upstairs. He wouldn’t even be bummed when he got one more Are you kidding us?—he was hardened to those by now. Nobody else would be there to pay any attention to him, anyhow.
Another gaudy sunset poured carnival-glass light into his living room when he opened the curtain. He hardly noticed it, which only went to show you could get used to anything. The first thing he did after opening the curtain was to try a lamp. It lit. He nodded to himself—he’d be able to nuke some leftovers tonight. Power had been on when he left Junipero, but that didn’t mean it was bound to stay on.
He turned off the lamp. The red-gold sunset was enough to read by for the moment, so he’d use it. The power company made up for being out of action half the time by jacking up the rates when it actually worked. That endeared it to everybody, as if it cared.
“The envelope . . .” Bryce said, as if he were in a tux handing out Academy Awards. Yeah, as if! He opened it. Out came a sheet of—surprise!—Wayne State letterhead. He unfolded it and read the laser-printed missive inside.
Dear Dr. Miller, the letter said, We would be most interested in considering you for the assistant professorship position opening this coming fall. As you may be aware, Professor Smetana, who had held this position, recently passed away due to lung disease caused by the supervolcano eruption. We do have state-mandated funding for the position, and are anxious to fill it as quickly as possible. I look forward to your prompt response. Sincerely—and the department chair’s signature.
“Fuck me,” Bryce said softly. Why had the lightning struck him? That was sure what it felt like. Two answers sprang to mind. Either or both might be true. If they didn’t fill the slot in a hurry, their state-mandated funding was liable to dry up and blow away. And they probably figured he’d work cheap. They were probably right, too.
His eye went back to the middle of the paragraph. Professor Smetana . . . recently passed away due to lung disease caused by the supervolcano eruption. Wayne State. Nebraska. Uh-huh. How far was Wayne from the Ashfall State Historical Park? A long-ago supervolcano blast had buried rhinos in ash; he’d seen some of their remains in Lincoln after barely surviving this latest explosion. Paleontologists had shown that they’d suffered from ash-induced lung troubles, too. Those were back, bigtime: Marie’s disease, otherwise known t
o broadcasters as HPO, the acronym for a cumbersome medical term. Poor Professor Smetana had a lot of company.
Bryce went into the bedroom and turned on his computer. He’d send an e-mail right away and follow it up with a snailmail letter in case it didn’t get through. He wrote the e-mail to the address under the signature. Then he Googled Wayne State’s Web site. He clicked on the link.
That server is temporarily unavailable. He swore at the error message and tried again. He got it again. Then he realized that, while he had power, Wayne State might not.
Where the hell was Wayne, Nebraska? A little more Googling showed him it was about a hundred miles from Omaha, north and a bit west. Wayne State had about 5,000 students. The town of Wayne—named after Revolutionary general Mad Anthony, Wikipedia explained—had 6,000 more.
Do I really want to move there? Bryce wondered. L.A. made every other place in the world except maybe New York City, London, and Paris seem like the boonies by comparison. Wayne was the boonies: the terminal boonies, if you wanted to get technical. You’d have to make your own fun. Boy, would you ever!
And what were winters there like? L.A. had got snow every winter since the eruption. Quite a few places, these days, were getting snow in summertime. Midwestern winters hadn’t been fun before the supervolcano went off, not if you were a California kid, they hadn’t. Did Wayne do its best impression of pre-eruption Winnipeg nowadays?
How he’d handle winter wasn’t the only thing he needed to worry about. What would Susan think? Would Wayne State have a job for her, too? It didn’t seem likely. How would she feel about that?
After thinking about Susan—quite a bit after thinking about her—Bryce remembered his mother. Barbara Miller hadn’t been thrilled when he moved up to the Valley. What would she say if he went two thousand miles away?
I want you to be happy. That’s what she would say, sure as God made Greek irregular verbs. And she’d be lying through her teeth. That was what the math guys called intuitively obvious.
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