Or maybe I decide this was just a way to waste time in a nowhere Denny’s. But Vanessa gave him her cell number instead of making one up. He entered it in his own phone. And he gave her that number, which she took in turn—mating rituals of the twenty-first century.
She paid for her own lunch. Bronislav tipped better than she did. But then, chances were he would stop here again. She wouldn’t, not unless God had an even more twisted sense of humor than He’d already shown. Vanessa slid into her car. She half expected it to crap out right there, just to show her what kind of sense of humor God had. It started okay, though.
Back onto the Interstate. Into the fast lane. Past the trucks. Arizona ahead, then California. Home! Who woulda thunk it?
And if Bronislav called—no, when, because he would—she’d figure out what she wanted to do. Maybe she’d have other things that needed taking care of: shampooing her tortoise, or something. Maybe she wouldn’t, too. She hadn’t wanted anybody, even a little bit, for a long time. It made her feel more alive. She drove on toward L.A., happier than she remembered being since the eruption.
* * *
Louise Ferguson glumly studied her bank statement and her three credit-card bills, all of which had chosen the same day to arrive. If that didn’t prove misery loved company, she was damned if she knew what would.
She’d been robbing Peter to pay Paul ever since the ramen works let her go, and robbing James to pay Peter, and robbing Mark to pay James, and robbing Luke to pay Mark, too. She was running low on saints and apostles. Even more to the point, she was running low on money.
“Shit,” she said softly: the perfect one-word summary of the situation.
It wasn’t as if she hadn’t been looking for work since she got laid off. The California Employment Development Department had no possible complaints on that score. She sent out applications online whenever the condo had power. When it didn’t, she rode the bus all over the South Bay. She talked to personnel officers, cooks, pet-store owners . . . anybody who’d listen to her and pay her more than unemployment doled out.
No one wanted to hire her. She was on the wrong side of fifty—not far on the wrong side, but she was. Only a few movie stars managed to stay hot-looking at her age. She wasn’t bad—she knew as much—but not bad didn’t cut it. She had some office skills, but she wasn’t a computer whiz, either.
And even if she were hot and a computer whiz, chances were it wouldn’t have mattered. Nobody was hiring anybody much. When a job did open up, it was guaranteed to have a zillion people clamoring for it. Somebody in that zillion would always be better qualified or cuter or younger or more male or whatever than Louise. Which meant . . .
“Shit,” she muttered again.
She looked back over her shoulder at James Henry. Little pitchers had big ears. Big mouths, too. Whatever they heard, they came out with. But he was busy with Duplos and toy cars.
And so she fished her phone out of her purse. She wondered if she’d have to give it up. Landlines were cheaper. With power so spotty, they might even be more reliable, regardless of whether they were less convenient. For now, though, she called Colin’s cell.
She hoped she wouldn’t get his voice mail. That would be a pain. He would call her back. He was nothing if not reliable. Reliable to a fault, she’d thought back in the day. Even so, returning her call would give him one more edge. As if he didn’t have enough already. Yeah, as if!
But he answered after the second ring. “Hello, Louise. What’s up?” As usual, he didn’t waste time beating around the bush.
“Colin, I need to borrow five hundred dollars.” She wasn’t normally so direct herself. Desperation did terrible things to people.
A long pause on the other end of the line. Then he said, “You need me to give you five hundred dollars, you mean.”
Louise felt the blood mount to her cheeks and ears. It wasn’t quite so bad as a hot flash, but it came close. “I’ll pay you back as soon as I can,” she said, hating to beg and knowing she had no choice. “As soon as I get work.” That sounded better.
“This isn’t the first time,” he said heavily.
“I know. Believe me, I wouldn’t be doing it unless I had to,” Louise answered. “As long as I had a job, I didn’t.”
“Yeah.” In her mind, she saw him grudge a nod, admitting she was right about that much. But then he said, “It’s not so easy for me right now, either.”
“I know Kelly’s going to have the baby.” Louise didn’t quite gloat over the word. He wouldn’t have to work so hard playing dad to the little brat as she had being single mom with James Henry, but he was no youngster himself. He’d feel it. Oh, would he ever!
“It’s not just that,” Colin said. “Vanessa’s back in town—”
“Yes, I know,” Louise broke in. “She called me. We’re going to get together for lunch in a couple of days.” God only knew when she’d see Vanessa again after that. They’d got along spikily even before she divorced Colin. There weren’t too many people Vanessa didn’t get along with spikily.
“Let me finish,” Colin said in his I’m-holding-on-to-my-patience voice. “She’s staying here right now, till she finds her own place—and till she finds some way to pay for a place of her own.”
“Oh? How’s that working out?” Louise asked with more interest than she’d expected to show. It had so many . . . intriguing possibilities.
“Well . . .” Another longish pause from her ex. At last, he said, “I haven’t told her to take her show on the road, anyhow. Not yet, I haven’t.”
“How’s she doing with Kelly?”
“I haven’t told her to take her show on the road yet,” Colin repeated. “Louise, I’ll write you the darn check, okay?” The line went dead.
She put the phone back in her purse. Yes, that was interesting, wasn’t it? He’d rather give her money and quit talking to her than tell her how things with Vanessa and his new wife were going. Louise nodded thoughtfully. She could paint her own pictures. She could, and she did. Having painted them, she slowly smiled. What she wouldn’t have given to be a fly on the wall at the old house!
James Henry chose that exact moment to look up from his own mayhem. The Duplos and cars had turned into something very much like a demolition-derby course. “Mommy?” he said.
“What is it, dear?”
“How come you were talking to Uncle Colin?” That was what James Henry called him. It wasn’t accurate, but there was no accurate name for what Colin was to James Henry: nothing shorter than father of my half-brothers and half-sister, anyhow.
“How do you know I was?” Louise answered one question with another.
“’Cause you were talking about money.”
“Oh.” That was more a sound of pain than a word. He was big enough to notice what was going on around him, all right.
Too many questions there, and all of them too pointed. Louise had always believed in being straight with children. She did her best now: “He’s going to loan me some money. Do you know what loan means?”
“You have to give it back?” Her son sounded doubtful.
Louise nodded. “That’s right. When I get some more of my own and I can afford to, I’ll pay it back.” She believed it when she said it. No, this wasn’t the first time she’d had to hit Colin up. She didn’t like to think about paying it all back . . . and so, most of the time, she didn’t.
James Henry found another question with sharp teeth: “How come Marshall doesn’t come around and watch me any more? He’s silly!”
“He is silly,” Louise agreed. “He doesn’t watch you so much any more because he did that while I went to my job. I haven’t been able to do that for a while now.”
“Why?” James Henry asked—the little kid’s favorite comeback.
“Because the company I worked for wasn’t making as much mon
ey as it wanted to, and so it didn’t need as many people as it had before. And I was one of the ones it let go.”
“Why?” he asked again.
“I don’t know,” Louise answered, which was the Lord’s truth. How much of all this he understood was liable to be a different question altogether. Talking about money with a preschooler was much too much like getting up on a stump in Peru and spouting Estonian.
Sure as hell, he just looked at her—looked at her with Teo’s dark eyes. She was his mother. She was Mommy. Of course she knew everything. That was a law of nature, same as the sun coming up every morning and going down every evening. It was a law of nature if you hadn’t started kindergarten yet, anyhow.
Tears stung Louise’s eyes. If only the world really worked that way! Mm-hmm, if only. When you looked at it from the far side of fifty, you wondered if you truly understood even one single goddamn thing. And the older you got, the less likely it seemed. She’d been sure about Colin. Then she’d been sure about Teo. Then . . . At least then she’d had a job, for Christ’s sake.
Now . . . Now she wasn’t sure of anything, and she didn’t have a job or much else. “Shit.” Her lips shaped the word again—silently, she thought. James Henry giggled, anyhow. Either she hadn’t been silent enough or he could read lips. Both possibilities made her want to go Shit one more time, but she didn’t. She fixed herself a drink instead.
* * *
Kelly’d got past the worst part of the pregnancy. She didn’t fall asleep if you looked at her sideways. She didn’t work at random times any more, either. They called it morning sickness, but what did they know? It had got her whenever it felt like getting her, as when those egg yolks started staring up at her so malevolently.
She wasn’t quite out to there yet, either, out to where she just wanted to have the kid and get it over with. It was going to be a girl. She and Colin were going to name it Deborah. You couldn’t go far wrong with a name from the Bible—well, not unless you picked something like Jezebel or Habakkuk. So thought Kelly, who didn’t have that kind of name, and Colin hadn’t argued with her. They didn’t argue much, which Kelly took as one more good sign.
She should have been happy, in other words. And she had been happy, right up till that dusty Toyota pulled up in front of the house and Vanessa got out.
She won’t stay for long, Kelly told herself. She kept telling herself, over and over. She won’t stay for long. Vanessa prided herself on making her own way. She couldn’t make her own way out of here soon enough to suit Kelly.
She didn’t know what the trouble was between the two of them. She believed that the first time it crossed her mind, anyhow. The first time, yes. Not the second. By then, she’d worked out what was going on—not what to do about it, but what it was.
She was a dog and Vanessa was a cat. It was about that simple. Kelly liked cats. But when you weren’t one and when you ran into somebody who was . . . Life got more interesting than you really wanted it to.
Vanessa was younger than she was, prettier than she was, more graceful than she was. She’d been on the road for a while. She was grubby and looked tired as she walked up to the door. Kelly opened it. Vanessa looked at her and said, “Oh. You must be Kelly.”
In another tone of voice, or without that flat Oh, it would have been fine. As things were, Kelly’s hackles rose. She still didn’t know what they were, but, whatever they were, up they went, all right. “Uh-huh,” she said, her own voice colder than post-eruption winter at the South Pole. “Come in.” She had to make herself get out of the way so Vanessa could.
Once past the front foyer, Vanessa looked around. “It’s . . . different,” she said, as if that should have been a hanging offense on the off chance it wasn’t.
“Yes. It is.” Kelly hadn’t known she could sound any chillier. She surprised herself, because she had no trouble at all. The decor everywhere but in Colin’s study had still been Louise’s when she started hanging out with him. The front room didn’t look like a rummage sale in a Russian Orthodox monastery any more.
“Well . . .” Vanessa had said, and then, “It’s better than Camp Constitution, anyhow.” By the way she said it, it wasn’t one hell of a lot better than the enormous refugee camp.
“Thanks,” Kelly’d answered. “If it doesn’t suit you, I’m sure you can find a motel.” She knew that was a mistake as soon as the words were out of her mouth. Too late then, of course. Things would have been bad enough even without a formal declaration of hostilities. Now? Now they’d be worse than bad enough.
“Where will you put me?” Vanessa had asked. It wasn’t No fucking way I’m going to a motel, lady, but it might as well have been.
“One of the upstairs bedrooms. Colin says it used to be yours a long time ago.” Stressing the last four words, Kelly’d hit back.
“Oh, boy. Back to high school,” Vanessa had muttered.
If they hadn’t already got on bad terms, Kelly would have forgiven her that one. Having to move back into your parents’ house was every grown American child’s nightmare. As things were, Kelly wasn’t in a slack-cutting mood. “Come on up, why don’t you?” she’d asked tonelessly.
Marshall was clacking away down the hall, behind a closed door. Eyeing the yellow tape on the door—POLICE LINE! DO NOT CROSS!—Vanessa’d curled her lip. “My God, hasn’t he changed at all?” she’d said.
“You’d know better than I would.” Kelly had knocked on Marshall’s door.
The clacking stopped. “What?” Marshall had sounded irritable, or as irritable as he ever sounded. He didn’t like getting interrupted while he was writing.
This was a special occasion, though, or Kelly thought it was. “Your sister’s home,” she’d answered.
After a few seconds, Marshall had said, “Cool.” He’d started typing again. Kelly wondered if he was ripped. She didn’t smell weed in the hallway. As far as she knew, he didn’t smoke much while he was working. He saved it for other times.
Vanessa’d looked ready to detonate. Again, even not liking her much, Kelly’d had trouble blaming her for that. But after a sentence—two at the most—the typing had stopped once more.
Out came Marshall. He’d nodded to Kelly, then (and only then) to Vanessa. “Hey,” he said to his sister.
“Hello, you big lunk. It is good to see you,” Vanessa answered. “So you finally graduated, did you?”
“’Fraid so,” Marshall admitted ruefully. He’d staved off the evil day as long as he could, till UC Santa Barbara requirements and Colin’s unwillingness to write any more tuition checks at last conspired to cast him forth into the real world.
“And?” Vanessa’d asked. Kelly was impressed at how much snark she could pack into a single word.
By the way Marshall’s eyebrow had twitched, so was he, and not favorably, either. “And so I’m back in San Atanasio instead of up at UCSB,” he’d replied. With a certain snarkiness of his own, he’d added, “You’re here, too.”
“Only till I find somewhere else,” Vanessa declared.
“Job market’s a little tough around here right now,” Marshall said. “Ask Mom if you don’t believe me.”
“Half the time, Mom doesn’t know enough to grab her ass with both hands,” Vanessa said scornfully.
Marshall lobbed a grenade: “Didn’t see her moving to Denver.”
Vanessa reddened. Kelly remembered wondering if she ought to run for a bomb shelter, and where she might find one. She sure wouldn’t have wanted that look aimed her way. But all Vanessa said was “Listen, do you use that stupid, noisy typewriter in the middle of the night? My room’s right on the other wide of the wall, you know.”
“I use it whenever I feel like it,” Marshall had answered. If the lights were on at night, there would be power for his iMac, too. He still preferred the computer, and it was a lot quieter. By the gleam in his eye,
though, the Royal portable from the pawnshop was liable to get some workouts in the wee smalls.
“Excuse me,” Kelly said. “I’m going downstairs to check on the rabbits.” The kitchen wasn’t a bomb shelter, but it might do for one in a pinch.
“Is that what I smell?” Marshall said. “Where’d they come from?”
“Your dad traded some brandy to another cop for them,” she said. “I think that guy raises them.”
“Bunny’s not bad.” Marshall sounded surprised that that was so.
“Better than MREs. Anything’s better than MREs.” Vanessa spoke with great conviction.
Kelly had been basting the rabbits when Colin came in. “Is that Vanessa’s car out front?” he’d asked after he kissed her.
“Yup,” Kelly said, and not one word more.
“How’s she doing?” he inquired.
“She’s here.” Again, Kelly kept things as concise as she could.
Colin grunted. He chuckled, not in any enormously cheerful way. “Yeah, we’re all here. One big, happy family, right?”
“If you say so,” Kelly’d replied.
“I just did. ’Course, because I say it, that doesn’t make it true.” Colin sighed. “Be an awful lot simpler if it did, y’know?” Kelly didn’t say anything at all that time. But she did nod.
XVII
The Frozen Tundra. That was what Packer fans called Lambeau Field in December and January even before the supervolcano erupted. Teams from warmer climes, teams that played in air-conditioned domes on ground-up tires dyed green, often turned up their toes when they had to play in cold and snow on dead grass (also sometimes dyed green).
They still stubbornly, defiantly, played outdoor football in midwinter in Green Bay. Bryce Miller remembered hearing that one fan froze to death in a playoff game the year before, no matter how much antifreeze he’d poured down. The big squawk wasn’t about his untimely passing—it was about who would inherit his season tickets.
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