She remembered having that thought before she went into the building. The power was on, which made everything seem almost the way it was before the supervolcano threw things for a loop. Almost, but, as with Steve’s touch of the hat brim, not quite. Before the supervolcano, she wouldn’t have heard anybody here burst into tears.
Which she did, right as the door closed behind her. It wasn’t just anybody, either. It was Patty, who’d been here since dirt and who, as far as Louise could tell, had a soul machined from the kind of steel that went into armor plate for tanks. These weren’t little sniffly tears, either. She was weeping and wailing as if she’d just found out her oldest son had been eaten by bears.
Hoping Patty hadn’t found out something too much like that, Louise rushed toward the older woman’s office. She almost ran into Mr. Nobashi, who was coming out. The salaryman looked upset, too: not only because Patty was crying but also, Louise judged, on account of what had made her cry. Whatever it was, he must have told it to Patty, and the telling must have set her off.
“Oh. Mrs. Ferguson,” he said. He wasn’t terrific with English. What he did to her name usually made her want to snicker. Not this morning. And what he did next scared the crap out of her: he bowed low, the bow of inferior to superior, and went on, “So sorry. I am so sorry.”
“So sorry for what? What happened?” Louise managed. Patty’d told gruesome stories about the manager from Japan who’d worked here before Mr. Nobashi. The guy’d thought the rules here were the same as they were on the other side of the Pacific. He’d gone home in a hurry, and the company got hit with a big, juicy sexual-harassment suit.
Mr. Nobashi had to know about that. In all the time Louise had worked here, she’d never heard that he’d fallen off the path of virtue. And if he chose now to do it, would he come on to Patty? She was about as sexy as a snapping turtle, and had the same kind of wattle under her chin. Wouldn’t Mr. Nobashi decide to try and butter his biscuits with somebody younger and cuter?
But Louise turned out to be wasting her time worrying about that particular misfortune. “Hiroshima call me just now,” Mr. Nobashi said. “Oh, Jeeesus Christ! How I can tell you? Home office say, with times so hard, we not profitable enough in America. They close this office. They send me home. You people. .” He gave that humiliated bow-that had to be the kind it was-again. “So sorry!”
“Close. . this office?” The words sounded as strange, as wrong, coming from Louise’s lips as they had when she heard them from her boss. The ramen company’s corporate headquarters in the USA had been here on Braxton Bragg Boulevard since the 1970s. Wouldn’t closing it deprive college students yet unborn of the chance to harden their arteries with cheap shrimp, chicken, beef, and Oriental noodles?
More to the point, wouldn’t closing it pound one more nail into the coffin of San Atanasio’s economy? Most to the point, wouldn’t closing it cost one Louise Ferguson her job at a time when people swarmed like so many starving locusts on any work that appeared? Too often, that was about what they were.
“Hai. Please believe me, I do everything I know how to do to stop this,” Mr. Nobashi said miserably. He spread his hands, palms up. “I fail.”
Patty came out of her office. Her face looked like the Mask of Tragedy with runny mascara streaks. “I been here twenty-six years,” she said, maybe to Mr. Nobashi, maybe to Louise, maybe only to herself. “Twenty-six years,” she repeated. “What am I gonna do without this place?”
Mr. Nobashi bowed to her the same way he’d bowed to Louise, or it might have been even deeper. “Please excuse me,” he said. “I am so sorry. Oh, Jeeesus Christ, I am so goddamn sorry.” For the first time, Louise heard him spice up his English the way he did his Japanese. He went on, “Like I tell you before, I do all I can to keep this location open. I think company make big mistake to close it. But I cannot stop them.”
It’s not my fault. That was what he was trying to say. No doubt it was the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. It cut no ice with Patty. “You’re closing this place,” she said in J’accuse! tones that made it sound as if Mr. Nobashi would be out front in person, nailing boards across the doorway. “What am I supposed to do for work now?”
It was a good question-a hell of a good question, in fact. It was the good question uppermost in Louise’s mind, too. Mr. Nobashi had the grace to look distressed. And well he might. They were sending him back to Hiroshima. They weren’t firing him, laying him off, downsizing him, shit-canning him. Call it whatever you pleased, but they weren’t doing it to him. Whereas the ramen works’ American employees. .
“Before I leave this country, I write you most excellent letter of recommendation,” Mr. Nobashi said. “And you also, Mrs. Ferguson.” Before either woman could interrupt to tear him a new asshole, he rushed on: “I know this is not enough. Please understand, I know very goddamn well. But it is the only thing I can do now.”
He sounded like somebody throwing old clothes in a trash bag to give to the Red Cross after an earthquake-or after a supervolcano eruption. Yes, he was doing what he could. That wasn’t anywhere near enough, though, not if you had the misfortune to be on the receiving end.
“My husband’s outa work now, too,” Patty said, and started crying again. “How’re we s’posed to make the mortgage payments if we’re both collecting unemployment, huh? We’re neither one of us spring chickens any more. Gettin’ somethin’ new wouldn’t be easy even if times was good. When times’re this shitty, we’re screwed.”
That was the word, all right. Louise had enough trouble making payments as things were. She had no one to fall back on now. Two unemployment checks were bound to be better than one.
Her cell phone chose that moment to go off in her purse. She reached in to kill it. She’d get the voice mail later on-unless the power died again, which wouldn’t affect her phone but would affect the network’s ability to reach it and be reached. With power failures so frequent, the you-must-take-care-of-it-right-this-second-if-not-sooner fixation of the years before the eruption was fading. Later would do, because later often had to do.
“What about Steve and the other guards?” she asked. She was thinking What about me? but Patty’d already taken care of that.
“It is most unfortunate situation for all concerned,” Mr. Nobashi said, which meant the security guards were screwed along with everybody else.
Well, almost everybody else. “You’ve still got a job, Mr. Nobashi,” Patty said bluntly. “You may have to go back to Japan to do it now, but you’ve still got it.”
“Please excuse me.” Mr. Nobashi got out of there at top speed, perhaps to spread the good news to the rest of the building.
“That rotten, no-good pissant.” Patty usually talked loud. Now she had no reason on God’s green earth to care if Mr. Nobashi heard her. “I oughta pinch his little head off.”
“Tell me about it!” Louise said.
“I gave this lousy company the best years of my life,” Patty went on, as if she hadn’t spoken.
“Tell me about it!” Louise said again. Patty sounded the way she had herself when she talked about leaving Colin, substituting only company for man. It had been true for Louise, it was just as true for Patty, and it did neither of them one single, solitary goddamn bit of good.
“I oughta burn this stinking place down.” Patty shook her head. “Nah. If I do, the fucking noodle people’d collect insurance. They’d laugh. . Well, fuck ’em all.” She went back into the office that had been hers and soon would belong to nobody.
Fuck ’em all. The fired person’s motto all through history-and that did no one any good, either. Alone there in the hallway, Louise fished out her phone. Might as well see what the message was.
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.
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