Back to the typewriter. The real world receded in favor of the world inside his head. He looked up in surprise when Janine’s key chunked in the lock. He also looked up in surprise because it was getting dark. He could still see the words he was putting on paper. Past that, he hadn’t cared about anything. He was lucky he’d remembered to get the stew going.
He stood up and kissed Janine. “Hey, babe,” he said, sounding more like his father than he knew. “How’d it go?”
“I looked stuff up,” she answered. “I filled out some forms that don’t need lawyers. I interviewed a little old lady who may have been allergic to an antibiotic her doctor prescribed for her. She’s trying to decide whether to sue him. The firm is trying to decide whether to take the case if she does. Another exciting day in the life of a paralegal.”
“Right,” he said, and lit a kerosene lantern. All over L.A., people were doing the same thing. If the Big One chose this moment to hit, a million lanterns would fall over and a million fires would start. It would be like San Francisco in 1906, only more spread out.
“Stew smells good,” she said, sniffing. She sounded as if she deserved part credit, and she did: it was her recipe. After the sniff, she asked, “What else did you do?”
“Couple thousand words,” he said, not without pride. “It’s starting to feel like it’s going somewhere.” He’d approached it with . . . fear was the right word. He wasn’t some teenager, who might plunge into a novel and finish because he didn’t know how hard it was. He knew, all right. Maybe he knew too well.
“Okay.” Janine didn’t read a lot for fun. She read more now than she had before the supervolcano blew. Everybody did, because less in the way of other kinds of entertainment was around. But she still didn’t read all that much, not like Marshall. She went on, “When are you gonna see if you can sell it?”
“Two or three more chapters,” he answered. “I should have enough then to see if I can get an agent interested.”
She started to say something, then let it go. She looked under the lid on the pot instead. She stirred with a serving spoon. “It’s coming along,” she said. “Do we have any wine in the icebox?”
Another old word reviving with the thing so many refrigerators had turned back into. Rob pulled out a bottle of Chablis. He poured for both of them. He’d done his duty on the work front. A little buzz would be nice. The wine would go with the stew, too.
He wouldn’t crack Iron Chef any time soon, but dinner turned out fine. They killed the bottle of wine. Marshall wondered if Janine was drinking herself into the mood. Kerosene lanterns made lousy reading lamps. The most fun you could have with the power off, you made in pairs. It was also the most fun you could have with the power on, but it had less competition now.
But that turned out not to be why Janine was nerving herself. Instead of doing dishes, she said, “Marshall, this isn’t working out. You’re not bringing in enough money to make us go, and all you do is sit and pound that typewriter. You don’t have enough ambition.”
“What? Being a writer isn’t an ambition?” he said, because he knew too well he had no comeback for the other.
“Not when it doesn’t make you anything, and it doesn’t,” she answered. “And I was hoping for more, well, excitement when I told Paul to hit the road. Coming home to somebody who hardly even notices I was gone doesn’t cut it.”
“So what do you want me to do? Pack up and leave?” he asked, hoping against hope she’d tell him no.
But she nodded briskly. “Yes, that’s about it. Oh, you don’t have to clear out of here by tomorrow morning or anything. I know it’s not simple without a working car. It isn’t like you don’t have anywhere to go, though.”
Back to the old house—again, he thought unhappily. “And how long till somebody else moves in here?” he asked. He was just being snarky—if she was out looking for that somebody else, he had no clue about it.
Or he hadn’t had a clue about it till her jaw dropped. Even by lantern light, he thought she turned red, but it might have been his imagination. The other damn well wasn’t. “That’s got nothing to do with anything,” she said, her voice a little shrill.
It had a lot to do with everything, as he knew perfectly well. Anybody who’ll cheat with you will cheat on you, too. Marshall heard his father’s words in his memory. Not for the first time, Dad knew what he was talking about, dammit. “Okay,” Marshall said, even if it wasn’t. “I’ll leave as soon as I can pack up my shit and get a car. It was fun while it lasted, wasn’t it?”
“Some of it.” Janine’s mouth twisted. She was gonna be like his sister. She’d erase the good times, so all the bad stuff would be his fault. That sucked, but what could you do? Except move out, anyway?
• • •
Kelly grunted when she lifted a box out of the Taurus’ trunk. “What did you put in here?” she asked. “Anvils?”
“That one’s got manuscripts and shit like that in it,” Marshall answered. “A sheet of paper doesn’t weigh anything much, but a box of paper’s heavier than a box of lead. If I did sci-fi, I’d figure out some bullshit reason why.”
“I always thought the same thing. Nice to know I’m not the only one.” Kelly lugged the box to the open front door. Playboy was shut in the laundry room to keep him from getting loose (not punishment—he’d been bribed inside with treats). Deborah, however, remained underfoot. “Get out of the way!” Kelly told her, not for the first time.
“C’mere, kiddo. I’ll read you a story,” Colin called from the front room. Deborah went, but she’d gone before, too. With his bad arm, Colin wasn’t helping Marshall move back in. Not to put too fine a point on it, Kelly’d told him she would break his good arm if he tried carrying stuff.
I’m getting too old for this myself, she thought as she hauled the box up the stairs. She did give Colin a certain amount of credit. He hadn’t gone even slightly I-told-you-so on Marshall. He’d just told him to come back and made sympathetic noises that sounded as if he meant them. Maybe he realized Marshall was beating himself up, and he didn’t have to do it for his son.
Marshall came upstairs right behind Kelly. His mouth wore a sour smile. “Gee, I wonder which way to turn from here,” he said. “I mean, I’ve never set eyes on this hallway before, right?”
“Don’t worry about it,” Kelly said. “You’ve got a roof over your head, and plenty of people don’t.”
“Yeah, yeah.” His nod was sour, too. “I don’t mind being my dad’s son. I’m kinda proud of it, to tell you the truth. But being my dad’s kid . . . That gets old, you know?”
She did know, or thought she did. If Professor Rheinburg hadn’t pulled strings or twisted arms or whatever he did at Cal State Dominguez, she would be scuffling herself.
“Times are hard,” she said. “What can you do? When your novel sells, things’ll start straightening out.”
“Glad you think so. Janine didn’t feel like waiting.”
“Well . . .” What was she supposed to say to that? She tried, “When you hooked up with her, you weren’t exactly thinking with the top part of your head, were you?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he answered, deadpan, as Colin might have. Then he did something Colin wouldn’t have in a million years: he grabbed his crotch. Kelly laughed so hard, she almost fell over.
“What’s funny?” Her husband’s voice floated up from below.
“Tell you later,” she said. And she did, after Marshall’s stuff was all in, Playboy was released (his irate meow said that, bribe or no bribe, they had no business living without a cat for so long), and Deborah went off to color or look at a picture book or play with dolls and dinosaurs or whatever else she felt like doing.
Colin chuckled. “He’s got it figured out, too, then. That’s good. If he could’ve seen it sooner—”
“He wouldn’t’ve got laid so much once he moved in with her,” Kelly interrupted.
“Yeah, there is that,” Colin said. “But that doesn’t
guarantee a happy ending, not unless you’re from Hollywood and you get to roll the credits before they start arguing about who didn’t clean up after the party and whose turn it is to take out the trash.”
“So what does guarantee a happy ending, O Sage of the Age?” Kelly asked, perhaps less sarcastically than she’d intended.
Colin reached up with his good hand. “Sorry—have to adjust my turban so the reception’s better,” he explained. Kelly rolled her eyes. He went on, “Dumb luck has a lot to do with it: finding the right person. Putting up with the annoying stuff the other person does, even if she—he—whatever—is the right one. Knowing that she—he—is gonna put up with your crap the same way. Making up your mind you’re gonna ride it out no matter where it goes. Oh, and being happy in the sack with the other person every once in a while sure doesn’t hurt, either.”
Kelly considered. “Sounds good to me. Doctor Phil can get off the TV now. Look out for Doctor Colin.”
“Look out, is right,” he said. “So how are we doing?”
She spread the fingers on her left hand. The diamonds in her wedding ring weren’t humongous, but they were sparkly. “I like it fine so far. Why don’t you ask me again in about thirty years?”
“Okay,” he said, and then, in a low voice, “Think Marshall’ll be out of the house yet?”
“As a matter of fact, yes,” Kelly answered. She saw she’d surprised him, but she meant it.
XXI
W
hen Louise fell for Colin, it was girl-meets-boy, the kind of thing that happens to almost everybody. As with an awful lot of people, it was also the kind of thing that got more and more boring as year crawled after year. When she fell for Teo all those years later, it was her Grand Passion, and she went head over heels. It never got boring, not even a little bit. It blew up in her face instead. That was worse. It hurt harder, anyhow—maybe not more, but harder. When she fell for Jared Watt, she hardly noticed she was doing it. She couldn’t very well help noticing the outward trappings. He took her to soccer matches and to musicals—and, to be fair, to movies and to restaurants, too. They went to bed together. She always made sure they took precautions. This long after James Henry came along, she didn’t think she could still catch. But she hadn’t thought she could when she got pregnant with him, either. So: precautions. Every single time.
The games and the shows and the dinners were only outward trappings, though. For quite a while, even the sex was only an outward trapping. An enjoyable trapping, certainly. Jared always worked hard to please her. That made her want to please him as well. But, for a long time, she thought of the two of them as what her grown kids would have called friends with benefits.
That he was still her boss also complicated things. He went out of his way to assure her she didn’t have to do anything with him. She believed him. If she hadn’t, she would have said no at some point early on to see what his word was worth and whether it was worth anything. All the same, dating somebody who could fire you was interesting in ways she could have done without.
Firing her didn’t seem the first thing on his mind, though. “I sure am glad the power wasn’t working the day you walked in,” he told her one morning. “I’ve said that before, haven’t I?”
“Yes, but I still like to hear it. So am I—for all kinds of reasons,” she answered. Why not? They were the only ones in the drugstore. Business on a cold, rainy winter morning wasn’t going to be brisk.
The power was working now. It let Louise see Jared blush. “Aside from that—” he began.
“Yes?”
“Aside from that,” he repeated firmly, and she let him go on, so he did: “Aside from that, if I had posted my want ad, I would’ve needed to sort through four dozen losers to find three or four possibles, and none of them would have been a quarter as good as you.”
“How do you mean that?” she asked. “And how would you have tested them? Or don’t I want to know?”
“I was talking about their job performance,” Jared said primly. “Other things just happen. Or, more often, they don’t.”
“I’m glad they did this time.” Louise meant it. Having someone interested in you that way was a sign you were still alive. It was a sign you hadn’t disappeared, the way so many women over fifty seemed to. America often acted as if it wanted to push the disappearing age down to somewhere between thirty and thirty-five. That was insane, which didn’t keep it from happening.
“Now that you mention it, so am I.” Jared suddenly stiffened. “A customer!” He said it just the way Mrs. Lovett did in Sweeney Todd. That Louise knew he was doing Mrs. Lovett only showed she’d been hanging out with him for a while. People you hung out with rubbed off on you. You rubbed off on them, too. Louise sometimes heard bits of her own speech come back at her out of Jared’s mouth.
The bell over the door chimed when the customer came in. She was a woman near the age of disappearing Louise had been worrying about a moment before. Her face had seen some hard times. So had her raincoat, which must have been ancient long before the supervolcano eruption made her need it more. She closed her umbrella and stuck it in the bucket Jared had put by the door for days like this.
“Horrible out there!” she said. “Horrible!”
“It is, yes,” Jared replied. “Can we help you with anything?”
“Well, I hope you won’t get mad, but I just came in to get out of the rain for a little while,” the woman replied. Louise nodded to herself. If the gal had done business here, even once five years ago, Jared would have had a name to go with her harsh face. Louise didn’t know how he did it, but he did.
“Glad to be your oasis,” he said now. “Look around. If you want to spend a little money here while you dry out, we won’t mind.”
“No, huh?” the woman said.
“No. But we won’t mind—too much—if you don’t, either.”
“Okay.” She went over to the shelves of used books. She picked up a mystery, which didn’t surprise Louise, and a book about the Battle of Gettysburg, which did. And she picked up one of the gaudy ceramic whatsits that Jared kept selling and Louise couldn’t stand. Finally, almost as an afterthought, she got a bottle of aspirin.
Louise rang her up, took her money, and made change. She put everything in a plastic bag. “Keep the books dry,” she said.
“Uh-huh.” The woman nodded. “Wouldn’t be much left of ’em by the time I got home if you didn’t.” She managed a smile that didn’t quite reach her colorless gray eyes. “Now that I’ve made you both rich, I guess I can go back out in it.”
“Try to stay dry,” Louise said. “The two of us, we’ll head for Tahiti on what you just spent.”
“Don’t you wish! Don’t we all wish!” The woman took her umbrella out of the bucket, opened the door, unfurled the umbrella, and walked away. She hadn’t gone far before the swirling curtains of rain hid her.
“Tahiti? I do wish,” Jared said.
“Me, too. Who doesn’t?” Louise answered. “The really scary thing is, L.A. still has good weather, at least as far as the United States goes. In spite of that, it does.” She waved at the downpour outside.
“The good news is, you’re right. That’s only rain. It isn’t snow. We don’t get snow very often. We never get snow in July or anything like that. If there weren’t so many people living here, this would be wonderful farm country. It wouldn’t even need irrigation, the way it did before it filled up.” The pharmacist paused for effect. “And the bad news is, you’re right.”
“Yeah.” Louise sighed. “For anybody who remembers the way we used to be, this is pretty miserable. I feel sorry for James Henry and all the people who won’t grow up remembering what it was like before the eruption.”
“It’ll be water to a duck for them,” Jared answered. “Before too long, they’ll get old enough to call us a bunch of nostalgic fools. You always need to find some reason or other to think your parents are fools. That helps remind you how wonderful you are yourself.”
�
�Tell me about it!” Louise exclaimed. “I went through that with my kids by Colin. Now I get to look forward to a rerun when James Henry turns sixteen. Isn’t that wonderful?”
“Sooner or later, they’ll end up doing a musical about it,” Jared said.
“Sooner or later, they end up doing a musical about everything.” Louise could tease him about it, as long as she didn’t get mean.
“You’re right,” he said cheerfully. “But so what? That’s part of what makes them fun to begin with. I wonder if I’ll live long enough to see it.”
I wonder if I’ll live long enough to was a notion Louise hadn’t had till she passed fifty. Before then, time seemed to stretch like a rubber band. Of course she was going to last forever, to live happily ever after. Only she wasn’t. She wouldn’t. Nobody did, no matter how much everybody expected to or wanted to. She might have thirty or forty years left. She might not have thirty or forty minutes. If she fell over from a heart attack, if the next person who walked into the drugstore was a strung-out crackhead with a Glock . . .
You never knew, that was all. Colin had dodged his brush with the Grim Reaper this past summer, but why? Only by luck, as far as she could tell.
Jared started reciting poetry:
“‘Had we but world enough, and time,
This coyness, Lady, were no crime . . .
But at my back I always hear
Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.’”
Was he following his own train of thought or guessing hers from her expression? She remembered the poem from high school. The poet wanted to get laid, but his girlfriend wouldn’t give it up. More meaning behind it, though, than she’d imagined when she was seventeen. Tears stung her eyes.
• • •
You couldn’t live with men. Vanessa had proved that to herself to her full satisfaction—or dissatisfaction, depending on how you looked at things. When she was in high school, she’d been sure she would have Peter’s babies. As soon as she met Bryce, though, old Peter didn’t seem like so much of a much.
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