Supervolcano: All Fall Down

XII

Colin Ferguson took his left hand off the bicycle’s handlebars and held out his arm with the hand pointing up: the signal for a right turn. He lived on a small, lightly traveled street, but he was getting into the habit of using hand signals all the time, the way he’d hit the flicky-doodle in his car whenever he changed lanes or turned.

He swung into his driveway. The Taurus still waited there. So did Kelly’s old Honda. Marshall’s little Toyota sat by the curb. They all ran. Colin thought they did, anyhow. None got used much, even in weather like this. Whose cars did?

With a sigh of relief, he swung off the bike and walked it onto the porch. He stood there a few seconds, letting the rainwater drip from his slicker. He slipped off his galoshes. He’d never worried about galoshes before the supervolcano. Who had, in SoCal? People did now, by God!

Before he could open the door, Kelly did it from the inside. They kissed briefly. “How are you?” she said as he brought the bike into the front hall. Hers already stood there, parked on old towels. He lowered the kickstand on his and put it next to hers.

“I’ve had days I liked better.” He walked back into the kitchen and pulled a green bottle out of the pantry. After he poured himself a fair knock, he asked Kelly, “Want some?”

“That’s okay. You know me-far as I’m concerned, Laphroaig is Kermit’s last name.” Instead of drinking scotch, Kelly popped the cap on a Red Trolley ale. She clinked the bottle against his glass. “Sympathies.”

“Thanks.” He let smoky fire run down his throat. She’d improved his taste in beer, but he’d never been able to persuade her that scotch tasted like anything but medicine. More for me, he thought.

“What went wrong?” she asked.

“Stupid judge let a perp off. Not enough evidence to keep him, he said. The video didn’t quite show his fingerprints, so we had no grounds for the arrest. My-”

“Ass,” Kelly said helpfully when he stalled.

“Yeah. That. It was a good bust. Honest to God, it was. That jerk in a robe, he-” The complaint dissolved into a disgusted growl. Colin drank more Laphroaig. “How are you? Better’n that, I hope.”

“Me? I’m tired. Long way to Dominguez on a bike. They say the buses are supposed to get more fuel next week, but I’ll believe it when I see it.”

“Mrmm.” Colin made a different kind of unhappy noise. “We’re getting low on gas ourselves. What we hijacked from LAPD is pretty much gone, and we aren’t getting as much as we still want to use. Pitcavage isn’t what you’d call happy about it.” He drained the glass and filled it again.

Kelly raised an eyebrow. “You don’t do that very often.”

“Not as often as I did before I started hanging around with you, and you can take that to the bank.” Despite what he said, Colin drank from the refill. “You’ve got no idea how wrecked I was the morning we met in Yellowstone-and that was after the aspirins and the coffee kicked in. But I don’t need it so much now.”

“Good. I’m doing something right, anyhow.” Kelly wasn’t halfway down her beer yet. She liked the taste and a little buzz. Colin didn’t think he’d ever seen her smashed, though. The reverse? The reverse wasn’t quite true.

“Darn right you are,” he said. “I wish you were chief, and doing things right in that chair. Pitcavage. .” Some of the beat cops called their big boss Shitcabbage. Colin hadn’t heard any of the detectives use that particular endearment, but they had others for the chief. And they had their reasons for using them, too.

“What now?” Kelly knew there were things he hadn’t said yet.

“His worthless kid,” Colin answered. “I mean, you try to make it easy on ’em. I never busted mine for smoking dope, and God knows I could have a million times.”

“You never busted me, either,” Kelly pointed out.

“You never smoked it in front of me to get my goat.”

“No,” she agreed quietly. “I knew you didn’t like it, and it never was that big a deal for me. I don’t miss it-beer’s fine.”

“Okay. Good, even,” Colin said. “If you’d thrown it in my face the way my kids did, I don’t suppose I would’ve busted you, either. But I wouldn’t’ve wanted to marry you, or I don’t think I would.”

“I sorta figured that out,” Kelly said, quiet still.

“Uh-huh. You’re no dummy.” Colin nodded and made that unhappy noise again. “Darren Pitcavage, though-” He took another sip of scotch, as if to wash the taste of Darren Pitcavage out of his mouth. “My kids aren’t mean. Mm, Vanessa is sometimes, I guess, but she’s snarky mean, not bar-brawl mean. If the chief hadn’t done some fancy talking, there’ve been a couple of times his precious flesh and blood might’ve found out more about the inside of a jail than he ever wanted to know.”

“Ah. Okay. Now I know where you’re coming from,” Kelly said. “This just happened again?”

“Too right it did,” Colin agreed. “There’s a bunch of bars and strip joints on Hesperus up near Braxton Bragg, and Darren thinks it’s cool to hang out in ’em. Maybe he picks up the girls. Maybe he just watches. I dunno. But the people who run those places, they sure know who he is-and who his old man is. Does he get free drinks?”

“Ya think?” Kelly said sarcastically.

“Yeah. Like that. And the bouncers cut him slack. For all I know, some of the girls give him a throw to keep him happy. But not everybody who goes to those joints knows who Lord Darren Pitcavage is.”

“Or cares,” Kelly said.

“Or cares. That’s right,” Colin said. “Some of those guys, they’d want to rack him up good if they did know. This latest fight he got into wasn’t like that. He was drunk, and so was the other fellow. The guy said something, and Darren coldcocked him. He’s got a nasty left hook-he knocked out two teeth and broke another one.”

“Let me guess-they called it self-defense?” Kelly asked.

“Right the first time,” Colin said heavily. “But if that Mexican’d hit Darren, then it would have been assault with intent to maim. Bet your sweet wazoo it would.” He gulped down the second drink.

Kelly reached into the refrigerator-which was, like most people’s these days, half-full of ice to keep things fresh when the power was out. She grabbed some steaks. “Here. I’ll pan-broil these. That’ll help get the taste of today out of your mouth.”

She does know how I work, Colin thought. The power wasn’t on right now, which meant the stove’s fancy electronic brain was useless. But natural gas still flowed when Kelly turned the knob. She started it with a match. Not elegant, but it worked. . till the gas stopped coming, if it did. When it did.

Marshall must have had some radar that told him when supper was ready. He walked in the front door right when Kelly took the pan off the fire. “Smells good,” he said.

“Sure it does-it’s food, isn’t it?” Colin said. “You can drag up a rock and help us eat it. And you can tell us how your little brother’s doing.” Morbid curiosity? Probably. But he had it, morbid or not. And it gave him and Marshall something to talk about. Fathers whose grown sons lived their own lives understood how important that could be.

The rock in question was a chair at the dining room table. “He’s, like, at the age where everything is no all the time,” Marshall said as he planted his hindquarters on it. “I mean, everything. You want to take a nap? No! You want me to read a book? No! You want to play outside? No! You want to turn into a centipede and crawl up the wall? No!”

“I remember those days,” Colin said, realizing he’d probably see them again himself, at least if he hadn’t started firing blanks. “You all went through ’em. Vanessa especially.”

“Why am I not surprised?” Marshall said with a crooked grin. “Anyway-”

Before he could get to anyway, Kelly broke in: “Did you really ask him if he wanted to turn into a centipede?”

“Sure,” Marshall answered. Colin believed him. His youngest would never set the world on fire when it came to foreign languages, but he was the one who’d translated An elephant is eating the beach into Spanish in high school. He had that surreal turn of thought-or else he was just flaky. He might be cut out to make a writer after all.

“When Vanessa had it worst,” Colin said reminiscently, “I went and asked her if she wanted a cookie. ‘No!’ she said, the way she did for everything for a couple of months there. Then what I said sank in, and she started to bawl.” After more than a quarter of a century, he could call up the expression of absolute dismay that had filled her face.

“You’re mean!” Kelly exclaimed, plopping steaks and green beans onto plates. But she was fighting laughter, fighting and losing. As she set his supper in front of him, she added, “You ended up giving her the cookie, didn’t you?”

“Who, me?” he returned.

She started to stare at him as if he were Ebenezer Scrooge in the flesh, even without bushy Victorian side whiskers. Then she realized he was having her on. “You’re impossible,” she said, more fondly than not.

“Well, I try,” he replied, not without pride.

If he hadn’t fed Vanessa that long-ago vanilla wafer, would his cruelty have warped her for life? Left her sour and embittered and suspicious, for instance? You never could tell. People went off the rails some kind of way, and half the time parents and priests and shrinks had no idea why. More than half the time.

But he had given her the goddamn cookie. She’d wound up sour and embittered and suspicious any which way. Sometimes you couldn’t win. Hell, sometimes you weren’t sure what game you were playing, or even whether you were playing a game at all.

He washed dishes while Kelly dried. Getting stuff clean with cold water took elbow grease. In his wisdom, he’d got an electric water heater here. It had been pretty new when the supervolcano erupted. Now, when it worked, they saved the hot water for bathing. A gas one would have been better. . or maybe not. These days, everything had some kind of electronic controls. And when the power went out, that probably would have fouled up the whole unit.

Marshall went upstairs to his room. It got quiet in there. He had a battery-powered lamp with LEDs that used next to no electricity, and he was writing in longhand when the juice was off. Colin wondered if he could scare up a typewriter from somewhere for the kid.

He lit a candle. You could get those without too much trouble. He wouldn’t have wanted to write or read or even play cards by candlelight, but it was enough to keep you from barking your shin on a table or tripping over a footstool and breaking your fool neck.

Kelly came and sat down beside him on the couch. He put his arm around her. She snuggled against him, for companionship and no doubt for warmth as well. The heating system was gas. But, again, the thermostat had a built-in computer chip. The people who’d designed all this stuff had assumed there’d be electricity 24/7/365. Well, Colin had assumed the same thing. Which only went to show that you never could tell, and that assuming wasn’t always smart.

“I tried to use a manual typewriter in the library at Dominguez Hills on a paper the other day,” Kelly said, echoing his thought of a little while before. “They put them out where the light’s good so people can, you know? But I don’t have the touch for it. You’ve got to hit the keys so hard! I felt like a rhino tapdancing on the keyboard.”

“Ever mess with one before?” Colin asked. She shook her head; he felt the motion against his shoulder. He went on, “I did-I had one when I was a kid. But I didn’t miss ’em a bit when computers came in. Typewriters aren’t-waddayacallit? — user-friendly, that’s it.”

“No shit, they aren’t!” Kelly burst out. Colin gave forth with a startled laugh. He wouldn’t have said that himself, not where she could hear it (though he wouldn’t’ve hesitated for a second if the intended ear belonged to Gabe Sanchez or to Chief Pitcavage). She laughed, too, but the amusement quickly left her face. She went on, “The world’s not user-friendly any more, you know?”

Colin started to laugh again. This time, the laugh didn’t pass his lips. Gasoline was a king’s ransom a gallon when you could get any. Most of the time, you couldn’t, not for money or for love. (Sex was a different story. The Vice Unit had closed out a pimp’s stable of hookers, who’d been turning tricks to keep his Lincoln Navigator’s tank full.) Power came on when it felt like coming on, which seemed less and less often day by day.

Not much TV. Not much Internet. Cell phone connections rare and spotty. Even good old-fashioned radio took electricity, for crying out loud.

“Well, we’ve still got books,” Colin said. His arm tightened around her. “And we’ve got each other, and maybe in a while we’ll have a baby to keep us too busy to worry about all the stuff we don’t have.”

“Marshall’s probably writing now,” she said. “Want to go upstairs and see what we can do about that?”

“The wench grows bold,” Colin said, and squeezed her again. Up the stairs they went. He closed the door to the master bedroom behind them.

* * *

Every once in a while these days, you read a newspaper story about somebody who killed himself because he couldn’t write on his Facebook wall or tweet any more. I’m cut off from the whole world, so why stay? one guy’s last note read.

The story said that particular suicider was all of nineteen years old. The reporter quoted John Donne’s No man is an island, entire to himself, and went on to talk about how, in the aftermath of the supervolcano eruption, we were all cast back on our individual resources in ways we couldn’t have imagined before first Yellowstone and then the whole country fell in on themselves.

Actually, before the supervolcano went off, Marshall Ferguson wouldn’t have been caught dead reading a newspaper. That was something else he left to his father and other antiques. If he needed news or anything else, he got it off the Net with his laptop or his smartphone.

He’d got a lot of his fun in the virtual world, too. He hadn’t spent all his free time playing World of Warcraft with buddies scattered cross the world, but he had spent quite a bit of it in front of a monitor.

Now those choices were mostly closed off. Even when he had power, the WoW servers often didn’t. He had the game on his hard drive, of course, but playing solo was to the massively multipersonal variant very much as masturbation was to sex. Better than nothing, yeah, but nowhere near so good as the real thing.

When the Net was up, seeing yesterday’s story in tomorrow’s Times just reminded you how pathetic a paper was. But it was yesterday’s story only if you’d found out about it yesterday. When you read it for the first time as it ran in the newspaper, it seemed new to you. Sports broadcasters doing the Olympics had called some of their shows plausibly live. The Times, these days, was plausibly live, and seemed authentically live because its competitors, which should have been really live, were in fact too often dead.

And damned if Marshall didn’t find a substitute-well, a substitute of sorts-for his MMRPG. One of his friends’ dads dug a beat-up maroon box out of the back of a closet and presented it to Lucas. The game was called Diplomacy. The board was a map of Europe with funky boundaries: the way things had looked before World War I rearranged political geography.

Fighting World War I was the point of the game. You could negotiate before you moved. You had to write down your orders. No fancy graphics or anything, but it turned out to be a pretty good way for a bunch of guys to kill a Saturday afternoon. . and evening. They finished up by candlelight.

“Gotta hand it to my old man,” Lucas said after Austria-Hungary’s red pieces had conquered a majority of the supply centers on the board and therefore won. “That’s not half bad.”

“Pretty good, in fact,” Marshall agreed, thinking his own father would probably get off on it, too. Another question occurred to him: “How long has your dad had this, anyway? I mean, dig it-the pieces are wood, man. When was the last time you saw that?”

“Dad told me he played it when he was in high school,” Lucas answered. That put it back in medieval times, or maybe further: Lucas’ father was paunchy and bald and graying. He might not actually have more miles on his odometer than Marshall’s father did, but he sure looked older.

“It’s a hella good game,” Marshall said, and all the players gathered around the board nodded. Judiciously, Marshall went on, “About the only thing wrong with it I can see is, how often can we get seven people together and, like, blow off a whole day?”

More nods from his comrades in skulduggery (you didn’t have to tell the truth while you were negotiating-only your final written orders counted). A guy named Tim, with whom Marshall had gone to high school and who didn’t seem to have done much since, eyed the board and the other players.

“When you wargame online, there’s lots of other people all the time,” he observed. “Or there used to be, when the power worked all the time. Here, it’s just us, y’know?”

People nodded yet again, with more or less patience depending on their own personalities. Tim was fun to hang out with, but he’d never be the brightest LED in the flashlight. He was the kind of guy who ordered pie a la mode with ice cream on it. He had no clue that he’d just said the same thing Marshall came out with a little while before. Tim had no clue about quite a few things, but he’d done a better than decent job of playing Italy in the game. Winning with Italy wasn’t impossible, but Marshall could see it wouldn’t be easy, either.

Lucas said, “It may not be as tough as you guys are making it out to be. I mean, we aren’t all stuck in nine-to-fives.” His mouth twisted. “No matter how much we wish we were.”

He was living with his dad, the same way Marshall was living at his old family house. Three of the others shared an apartment that would have been about right for one of them. Tim had lived out of his car for a while, till gas got too scarce and too expensive to make that practical. Now he was just kind of around. Maybe he crashed on one girlfriend or another, or on one girlfriend and another. Marshall didn’t know the details. These days, with so many people from sea to shining sea scuffling, asking a whole bunch of questions was the worst kind of bad form.

“We’ll try,” Marshall said. “What else can we do?”

* * *

Louise Ferguson fidgeted while she waited for the bus. It was-surprise! — late again. When cities had trouble getting enough fuel for public transit and police cars, you knew the world was going to hell in a handbasket. It wouldn’t be going to hell in anything requiring gasoline, that was for sure.

Like most cars, hers sat in the garage under her condo almost all the time, a monument to the way things had been before the supervolcano erupted. She hoped Mr. Nobashi would understand. He still drove in to the ramen works two or three times a week. But then, he was a fancy executive, not an administrative assistant. And he got his pay straight from the home office in Hiroshima. With the way the dollar had nosedived against the yen since the eruption, that made his salary go a lot further, too.

Here came the bus at last. It left a black plume of diesel fumes behind it as it rumbled north on Sword Beach. It wasn’t supposed to do that. It was supposed to be clean, and not stinky. God only knew the last time anyone’d serviced that overworked engine.

Before the eruption, even people who didn’t think of themselves as green would have had conniptions about that smoke-belching bus. Not today, Josephine! Anything that dumped CO2 into the air and helped fight the supervolcano’s big chill was wonderful, even if it smelled nasty.

The bus stopped. Louise handed the driver a buck and a half. Like a lot of SoCal towns, San Atanasio had stopped using computerized bus passes. When the computers didn’t run all the time, you couldn’t rely on them the way people had for so long. You had to make do with simpler things.

Mr. Nobashi, for instance, had brought an abacus into the ramen works. It wasn’t just for show, either. The way his fingers flicked the beads was a sight to behold; Patty from the Farm Belt called it a caution. He was about as fast and accurate with the abacus as Louise was with a calculator. Next thing you knew, he’d dredge up a slide rule from somewhere.

Only a few cars shared Sword Beach with the bus. Most of the traffic was bicycles, with occasional full-sized trikes and skateboards. From what the papers said, random street crime (except for bike thefts) was way down. Getting away was harder than it had been, and people were more willing to chase you. The world was less impersonal, less withdrawn, then it had been when the automobile was king.

The bus stopped at Sword Beach and Braxton Bragg Boulevard. Louise got out there, because it turned the wrong way on Braxton Bragg. Back in the day, she would’ve grumbled at walking a couple of blocks from the bus stop to her workplace. When everybody did it, it was no big deal.

No big deal when it wasn’t raining, anyhow. Right this minute, it wasn’t. The spring sun, the sun that the supervolcano eruption had turned pale and watery, was shining as brightly as it ever did these days. Louise had stuck an umbrella in her purse just the same. No guarantee it wouldn’t be raining when she came out this afternoon. And wasn’t that a hell of a thing? If you couldn’t trust SoCal weather, what could you trust?

Nothing. Nothing and nobody. Louise’s mouth thinned to a bloodless line. She made herself relax, because otherwise she’d screw up the lipstick she’d so carefully applied before she left. But if having James Henry hadn’t taught her that lesson once and for all, she couldn’t imagine what would do the trick.

Here was Ramen Central. The sliding security gate was open: the only connection between the property and the outside world. Steel fencing topped by razor wire protected the rest of the perimeter (for that matter, razor wire topped the gate, too). Despite fence and wire, they’d still had stuff disappear from parked cars. That was why they had a full-time armed security guard.

He touched the brim of his drill-sergeant hat in what was almost but not quite a salute. “Mornin’, Mrs. Ferguson,” he said.

“Good morning, Steve,” she said. She’d given up trying to get the big Hispanic guy to call her Louise. He’d served a long hitch in the Army, he’d fought in Afghanistan, and he had a strong sense of rank and hierarchy. Sometimes all you could do was roll with things.

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.