“Here? Fat chance!” she answered. He only chuckled. Did he know what went on with the women who had appointments with Micah Husak? If he didn’t know, could he guess? Vanessa wouldn’t have been surprised.
A new thought occurred to her as she trudged grimly back toward her tent. Was Micah the only one there who collected favors for favors? Or did half, or more than half, the FEMA guys get what they wanted when they wanted it? That wouldn’t have surprised her one bit, either. There were bound to be too many chances, too many temptations, to resist.
A cat ambling down the lane glanced back over its shoulder at her and picked the amble up to a trot. It was mostly white, with a couple of black spots. It had a fat bottom and a small head. When it paused for a moment to wash a foot, it looked like a bowling pin with ears.
Loneliness stabbed through Vanessa. “Kitty, kitty, kitty!” she called. They’d made her turn her cat loose when she got to the refugee center in Garden City, Kansas. The high school there had no room for pets. She kept hoping someone else had realized how wonderful Pickles was and taken him in, but she knew he was bound to be dead. So were most of the people who’d lived in Garden City. An awful lot a volcanic ash had come down there: not as much as in Denver, but an awful lot all the same.
She called the fat-assed white cat again. Its ears twitched toward her, but it decided that foot was clean enough and trotted on.
“Stupid thing,” Vanessa muttered. More likely, though, it already had a human-or, like Micah Husak, more than one-on its string. Even if it didn’t, cats had a fine old time at Camp Constitution. Swarms of people in one none-too-sanitary place meant corresponding swarms of mice and rats.
You could have pets here. Some people had brought in big, mean dogs. Those mostly didn’t last long. They either had sad accidents or they started starving and had to be released outside the camp or put down. There were no kibble distributions here. You fed pets from your own rations. A cat? No problem. A Rottweiler? That was a different story.
A little dog might be okay. Cats could like you pretty well, but they were also in the deal for what they could get out of it. Dogs loved you whether you deserved it or not. That kind of slavish devotion had always grated on Vanessa. The longer she had anything to do with Micah Husak, though, the less attractive feline expediency looked.
“A puppy?” she said, and nodded to herself. “A puppy.” They wouldn’t be hard to find. And something that wouldn’t care for her just on account of what she did for it seemed especially wonderful right after she’d visited the administration building.
Louise Ferguson glanced at the clock on the wall across from her desk. She stood up. She’d forgotten how much effort that took when you were pregnant out to here. The bowling ball in your belly messed up your balance, too, just at the time when falling would be most disastrous.
She stuck her head into Mr. Nobashi’s inner office. Her boss was on the phone, yelling in Japanese mixed with occasional English swearwords. The ramen company’s corporate headquarters were in Hiroshima. The San Atanasio building was only a colonial outpost.
Mr. Nobashi raised a questioning eyebrow. “Please excuse me,” Louise said, “but I have a doctor’s appointment at eleven o’clock.” She patted her bulging belly to show what kind of appointment it was.
“Oh, Jesus Christ!” Her boss covered the phone’s mouthpiece with the palm of one hand. “Okay. You go. I see you after lunch, yes?” His English was telegraphic and heavily accented, but Louise rarely had trouble figuring out what he meant.
“Thank you. Yes,” Louise answered. The baby kicked or stretched or did whatever the hell he did. People talked about the miracle of life. What that amounted to for a woman was, stuff was going on inside you, but it wasn’t stuff you were doing. It was wonderful, sure. But this was the fourth time Louise had gone through it, and it still weirded her out.
She walked out to the parking lot. The ramen works’ American center had been on Braxton Bragg Boulevard since the 1970s. The neighborhood was a lot rougher now than it had been back in the day. A fence of stout steel palings topped by razor wire surrounded the lot. Despite the fence, an armed guard stayed on duty 24/7.
The Hispanic guy out there now nodded to Louise and touched an index finger to the brim of his dark blue Smokey the Bear hat in what was almost but not quite a salute. He remained watchful and alert. He’d probably done a tour or two in Iraq or Afghanistan. How much easier was this? He didn’t have to worry about IEDs in San Atanasio, anyhow.
He kept an eye on her till she’d left the lot. She didn’t know where the ramen company hired its guards, but they were all solid.
She flicked on her headlights. The morning fog had thinned, but it was still there. The lights wouldn’t do anything to help her see. They’d help other people see her, though, which also counted. The South Bay could get some real pea-soupers, but at this time of year? She shook her head. Not before the supervolcano erupted. Not a chance.
Her OB-GYN’s office was only about ten minutes away. The doc she’d gone to when Rob, Vanessa, and Marshall were born had long since retired. Dr. Travis Suzuki was one of the new breed: younger than she was, brusque, and efficient. He thought she was nutso for having the baby. He didn’t come right out and say so, but she also didn’t need a magnifying glass to read between the lines.
When she walked into the waiting room, two other pregnant women were sitting there. They were both in their twenties. The blonde chewed gum while she listened to her iPod. The Asian gal was leafing through a copy of People. They both gaped at her stomach as if they couldn’t believe their eyes. They probably couldn’t. She was about as old as the two of them put together.
She grabbed the first magazine in the rack and sat down to look at it. It was Vegetarian Times, hardly something she would have chosen if she’d been paying attention. Teo had talked about not eating meat any more-an aerobics instructor feared fat even more than he feared the IRS. But he’d never done more than talk. He needed protein to stay strong. And, just as much to the point, meat tasted so good.
Well, she didn’t need to worry about Teo any more. Except, of course, for the small detail he’d given her to remember him by, the detail that was getting bigger by the day and would pop pretty soon. Yeah, except for that, she thought.
One of the other women got called into an examination room, then the second. A Hispanic gal came in. She was older than both of those two-in her thirties somewhere. She still gave Louise a look that said You gotta be jiving me.
Louise stared stonily back. In your ear, lady. The Hispanic woman looked away first. She sat down and started texting on her BlackBerry.
The door to the back part of the office opened. “You can come in now, Ms. Ferguson,” the receptionist said.
“Happy day.” Louise levered herself out of the chair with one arm. She wasn’t sorry to put Vegetarian Times back in the rack. It was a sad little magazine, skinny and printed on crappy paper. Who would have thought the supervolcano could screw up something like that? It did, though, along with so much else.
A nurse took charge of Louise. “Why don’t we climb on the scales?” she said.
“We? You’re getting on with me?” Louise said. The nurse (her name was Terri-Louise felt proud of herself for remembering) laughed. It wasn’t that funny, but then, neither was Terri’s assumption that, because she was having a baby, she was also turning back into one.
She got on the scale. She weighed. . what she weighed. She wondered how much would come off after the kid finally emerged. She wondered if any would. One more thing to worry about. It wasn’t even close to the top of her list-and, when she couldn’t worry too much about her weight, that was one honking list.
Terri led her into an examination room and took her temperature and her blood pressure. The nurse wrote in the chart. “What are they?” Louise asked.
“Both normal,” Terri answered after a moment’s pause. The nerve of some people, wanting to know their own numbers! Louise had seen that attitude
before in other nurses. Terri went on, “Dr. Suzuki will see you in a few minutes.” Out she went.
There was a magazine rack in the examination room, too, but the only magazine in it was a Car and Driver from before the eruption. Louise was more interested in it than in jumping out the window into the parking lot, but not much more. She left it in the rack. She wouldn’t die of boredom before the doctor came in.
And in he swept, Terri in his wake to keep the proprieties proped or whatever. He reminded her of Mr. Sulu from Star Trek. His weapons of choice, though, were rubber gloves, not photon torpedoes. “How are you feeling today?” he asked briskly.
“Like the Goodyear Blimp. How else am I gonna feel?” she retorted. He laughed. She added, “And I do wish he’d come out and get it over with. I’m sick of lugging him around.”
Dr. Suzuki nodded. How many times had he heard variations on that theme? Probably from every woman close to her due date. He glanced into the chart. “Your numbers have been good all along. Your BP is low. You’ve never had protein in your urine or anything like that. It should be a normal delivery. We will be extra careful, though. I don’t mean to offend you, but at your age we can’t take anything for granted.”
“I’m not offended. I know how old I am. I’d better,” Louise said.
“Er-yes.” Dr. Suzuki didn’t seem to know what to make of that. Was I so dry before I married Colin, or did it rub off from him? Louise wondered. Chances were it had rubbed off. She still thought of anything peculiar as nutso because of Wes Jones. And he was just the guy who’d lived across the street, not somebody who’d fathered her three children.
Three out of four now, she thought.
Dr. Suzuki tried again: “If anything seems even a little out of the ordinary, call me or go to the hospital right away. Don’t waste time and don’t take chances. Do you understand?”
“I can’t very well not understand that, can I?” Louise returned sharply.
He rolled his eyes. “Ms. Ferguson, you’d be amazed.”
And that was bound to be true. If anybody learned never to underestimate the power of human stupidity, someone who’d been married to a cop for a long time sure would. The armed robber who’d left his driver’s license on the counter of the liquor store he’d knocked over but who seemed surprised anyway when he got busted. . The gal who’d stabbed her husband in the neck over a six-pack of Big Red chewing gum. . Oh, the list went on and on.
“Well, I hope I’m not dumb that way, anyhow,” Louise said.
“Okay, fair enough.” Dr. Suzuki nodded. “I’ll see you again in two weeks or when your contractions start, whichever comes first.”
Louise made the appointment with the receptionist. Whether she’d keep it, as the OB-GYN had said, was more up to Junior than to her. The doctor’s office was in a better part of town than the ramen works. It didn’t have, or need, a fortified parking lot. Louise sighed. She remembered the days when no business in San Atanasio did.
Which proved. . what, exactly? That the world changed whether she liked it or not? That she wasn’t so young as she had been once upon a time? All of the above? The baby kicked inside her as she got into her car. “Stop that,” she told him, not that he listened. She wasn’t too old to get pregnant. She’d thought she was, but nooooo. Life was full of surprises, wasn’t it? Uh-huh. You betcha.
When she walked into the ramen place, Patty asked her, “How you doing?” In the old days, Patty would have been a man with a green eyeshade. What she couldn’t do with and to numbers couldn’t be done.
“Except for this”-Louise patted her front bumper-“I’m fine.”
“Yeah. Except.” Patty would have to fill Louise’s slot, too, when Louise had the baby. It wasn’t that she couldn’t. She could do the job better than Louise could; she’d taught it to Louise. But she couldn’t stand Mr. Nobashi-he drove her nutso.
As soon as Louise got back to her desk, he yelled for a Coke and a danish. He ran on them. Why he didn’t have diabetes, Louise couldn’t imagine. Not from lack of effort, that was for sure. Fetching the stuff for himself would have been beneath a Japanese boss’ dignity. Having a massively pregnant woman do it for him wasn’t.
All things considered, Patty had a point.
Once she’d supplied Mr. Nobashi with his early-afternoon sugar and caffeine, Louise went back to figuring inventories and sales trends. It wasn’t what you’d call exciting. Well, if she wanted excitement, all she had to do was wait till Junior came out. He’d take care of that for her. Oh, wouldn’t he just!
III
The door to Marshall Ferguson’s room had a strip of yellow police tape running diagonally across it. CRIME SCENE-DO NOT CROSS was printed on it in big black block letters. Like any newly returned college graduate living in a house with his father and his father’s new wife, he was sensitive about his privacy.
Unlike some, he realized they were sensitive about theirs, too. And they didn’t pry. He could even smoke dope in there if he didn’t make it too obvious he was getting wasted. For somebody whose dad was a cop, that was a small, or maybe not such a small, miracle.
About the only thing his father required of him was that he sit in front of his computer for a couple of hours every day, working on whatever he was working on. “Look,” Colin Ferguson said, “I know turning into a writer doesn’t happen overnight. But it doesn’t happen if you don’t work at it, either. So you’ll work.”
Marshall resented that, but not as much as he might have. He was old enough to have got past the teenage thing of being sure anything his old man said was bullshit just because his old man said it. But he did bristle when his dad suggested-no, ordained was the better word-that he pay a third of whatever he made as rent.
“What happens if I get a fat book contract?” he asked. Two sold stories, and he had big ambitions-or dreams, anyhow.
“Then we dicker,” Dad said at once, which tossed a bucket of water on Marshall’s sparking temper. His father went on, “Look, I’m not trying to screw you. I’m just trying to remind you that you’ve got some obligations. You’re allegedly a grown-up, after all.”
“Thanks for that allegedly. I appreciate it,” Marshall said.
“Figured you would.” Dad didn’t even blink. Trying to top him at sarcasm was a losing game. He eyed Marshall. “Other thing is, if I get sick of nothing coming in after a while, you’ll start looking for a job or you’ll find yourself somewhere else to stay.”
“How long is a while? Who gets to decide?”
“I decide how long it is.” Colin Ferguson answered both questions at once. He even explained why: “After all, I’m the guy paying the mortgage.”
What am I supposed to say to that? Marshall wondered. He almost asked if Kelly was paying rent. Fortunately, he had the sense not to. For one thing, she was married to Dad. For another, she had a paying job at Dominguez Hills. So all Marshall did say, after that brief pause for thought, was, “Okay.”
His father had inhaled. Dad was braced for an argument, all right, and ready to blow Marshall out of the water. Now he exhaled again: he’d got dressed up, and he didn’t have any place to go. He sent Marshall a crooked grin. “You are growing up, aren’t you?”
Marshall was convinced he’d been grown up for years now. Whenever he tried to say as much, his old man gave him the horse laugh. Since they’d come through this exchange without the fireworks that might have soured things between them, he let it go without offering Dad such a juicy target. “Whatever,” he said, and left it right there. The less you came out with, the less you’d regret later on.
Then his father caught him by surprise: “I bet I know where you’ll be able to make some money, anyhow. Not enough to live on, but some.”
“Oh, yeah? Where?” Marshall wondered what kind of harebrained scheme was dancing through Dad’s beady little mind.
Only it turned out not to be so harebrained after all. “Taking care of your half-brother, that’s where,” Colin Ferguson answered. “Your mother will be loo
king for somebody to do that, I’m sure, once she runs through however much maternity leave they give her.”
“Huh,” Marshall said thoughtfully. Whatever he might have been looking for, that wasn’t it. “I’m. . not sure I want to do that. I. . don’t know how much I want to have to do with Mom these days. And taking care of, of that kid?” He didn’t even want to say Teo’s name. Teo, after all, had stolen Mom away from Dad and screwed up the family. That was how he’d seen it at the time, anyhow. Little by little, he’d come to realize things weren’t so simple (which was another part of growing up). The first approximation still ruled his gut, though.
His father sighed. “Well, it’s your call. If you don’t want to, I sure won’t try and make you. But it’s not like I’d mind or anything. I. . wish your mother the best in spite of everything. I don’t want her back. Too much water over the dam for that. But I do wish her the best. And she’ll need the help. Better if she gets it from somebody she knows, somebody she can trust, and not somebody she hires off a supermarket bulletin board or from Craigslist or somewhere.”
“I’ll think about it.” Marshall hadn’t expected to say even that much.
“Thanks. You do that.” Dad gave him another one of those lopsided grins. “Five gets you ten taking care of a baby gives you something new to write about, too.”
“Hot shit!” If Marshall sounded distinctly unenthusiastic, it was only because he was. He didn’t let Dad beat him to the punch line, either: “That’s what I’d be writing about, too, isn’t it?”
“Hot shit and cold shit and piss and spit-up and all kinds of gross stuff,” his father agreed. “But there’d be other stuff, too. Getting to know your half-brother, and him getting to know you, when you’re old enough to be his father.”
“I guess.” Marshall didn’t want to think of it in those terms. If he was old enough to be his mother’s son’s father. . Somewhere, a goose was walking on old Oedipus’ grave. The idea creeped him out bigtime.
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