Supervolcano: All Fall Down

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.

“Hey, you’ll do it, whether I manage or not. I can be your kept man,” Bryce said.

“Right. Whatever you’re smoking, let me have some, too,” she answered. “I wonder if your high school needs two Latin teachers who can do world history, too.” Before he could say anything, she quickly added, “Yes, I’m kidding. You’re lucky Junipero needs one person in that slot.”

“Lucky. Uh-huh.” But Bryce didn’t push it. As things went these days, he was lucky. He had work. As long as he stayed careful and lucky, it let him pay the rent, eat, and put aside a widow’s mite for the day after tomorrow. If Susan added even a little something to the pot after they got married, they’d. . kinda get along.

Maybe things would come back to normal by the time they hit middle age. Geologists and climatologists were still hashing that out. Bryce got distant, possibly distorted echoes of the argument from Colin: Kelly was one of the people doing the arguing. Right now the answer seemed to be Nobody knows for sure, but it doesn’t look so good. Or so hot, if your taste ran to old-fashioned slang and bad puns.

“It’s not fair!” Susan burst out.

Bryce nodded. “Nope. It’s not. But I don’t know what to do about it, hon. Fair or not, we’re stuck with it.”

“Shit,” she said. “When Rome fell, it fell an inch at a time, and the Romans kicked and bit and clawed as hard as they could. Mother Nature didn’t whack ’em upside the head with a shillelagh.”

“And you’re not even Irish,” he said. She made as if to whack him upside the head. Luckily, she wasn’t carrying a concealed shillelagh.

Two days later, Bryce looked forward to getting back to his apartment and pouring down a beer. Trying to explain the ablative absolute was as foredoomed as the charge of the Light Brigade. High school kids just didn’t get a language that used cases, not prepositions and word order, for its special effects-and the ablative absolute was some of Latin’s Pixar splendor.

He’d explained till he was blue in the face, but they didn’t see it. Well, Olga Smyslovsky-Sasha’s younger sister-did, but she spoke a language with more cases than Latin when she went home from school. Like Sasha, she had trouble with Latin vocabulary, but the grammar was a piece of cake for her. Nice to know it was for somebody.

Bryce wondered why he bothered opening his mailbox. He didn’t expect any bills. Junk mail was way down since the eruption. Paper was scarce and expensive, and so was everything else. Businesses hunkered down, the same as the people who mostly didn’t patronize them.

“What’s this?” he wondered out loud, plucking an envelope from the box. It was from Wayne State. Wayne State, he read on the printed return address, was in Wayne, Nebraska. One more “Screw you very much for your interest” letter, Bryce thought. He was damned if he remembered sending any kind of application to Wayne State. Maybe it was a preventive rejection-don’t you dare try to land a job with us! Were there such things? He wouldn’t have been surprised, not even a little bit.

He took it upstairs. He wouldn’t even be bummed when he got one more Are you kidding us? — he was hardened to those by now. Nobody else would be there to pay any attention to him, anyhow.

Another gaudy sunset poured carnival-glass light into his living room when he opened the curtain. He hardly noticed it, which only went to show you could get used to anything. The first thing he did after opening the curtain was to try a lamp. It lit. He nodded to himself-he’d be able to nuke some leftovers tonight. Power had been on when he left Junipero, but that didn’t mean it was bound to stay on.

He turned off the lamp. The red-gold sunset was enough to read by for the moment, so he’d use it. The power company made up for being out of action half the time by jacking up the rates when it actually worked. That endeared it to everybody, as if it cared.

“The envelope. .” Bryce said, as if he were in a tux handing out Academy Awards. Yeah, as if! He opened it. Out came a sheet of-surprise! — Wayne State letterhead. He unfolded it and read the laser-printed missive inside.

Dear Dr. Miller, the letter said, We would be most interested in considering you for the assistant professorship position opening this coming fall. As you may be aware, Professor Smetana, who had held this position, recently passed away due to lung disease caused by the supervolcano eruption. We do have state-mandated funding for the position, and are anxious to fill it as quickly as possible. I look forward to your prompt response. Sincerely-and the department chair’s signature.

“Fuck me,” Bryce said softly. Why had the lightning struck him? That was sure what it felt like. Two answers sprang to mind. Either or both might be true. If they didn’t fill the slot in a hurry, their state-mandated funding was liable to dry up and blow away. And they probably figured he’d work cheap. They were probably right, too.

His eye went back to the middle of the paragraph. Professor Smetana. . recently passed away due to lung disease caused by the supervolcano eruption. Wayne State. Nebraska. Uh-huh. How far was Wayne from the Ashfall State Historical Park? A long-ago supervolcano blast had buried rhinos in ash; he’d seen some of their remains in Lincoln after barely surviving this latest explosion. Paleontologists had shown that they’d suffered from ash-induced lung troubles, too. Those were back, bigtime: Marie’s disease, otherwise known to broadcasters as HPO, the acronym for a cumbersome medical term. Poor Professor Smetana had a lot of company.

Bryce went into the bedroom and turned on his computer. He’d send an e-mail right away and follow it up with a snailmail letter in case it didn’t get through. He wrote the e-mail to the address under the signature. Then he Googled Wayne State’s Web site. He clicked on the link.

That server is temporarily unavailable. He swore at the error message and tried again. He got it again. Then he realized that, while he had power, Wayne State might not.

Where the hell was Wayne, Nebraska? A little more Googling showed him it was about a hundred miles from Omaha, north and a bit west. Wayne State had about 5,000 students. The town of Wayne-named after Revolutionary general Mad Anthony, Wikipedia explained-had 6,000 more.

Do I really want to move there? Bryce wondered. L.A. made every other place in the world except maybe New York City, London, and Paris seem like the boonies by comparison. Wayne was the boonies: the terminal boonies, if you wanted to get technical. You’d have to make your own fun. Boy, would you ever!

And what were winters there like? L.A. had got snow every winter since the eruption. Quite a few places, these days, were getting snow in summertime. Midwestern winters hadn’t been fun before the supervolcano went off, not if you were a California kid, they hadn’t. Did Wayne do its best impression of pre-eruption Winnipeg nowadays?

How he’d handle winter wasn’t the only thing he needed to worry about. What would Susan think? Would Wayne State have a job for her, too? It didn’t seem likely. How would she feel about that?

After thinking about Susan-quite a bit after thinking about her-Bryce remembered his mother. Barbara Miller hadn’t been thrilled when he moved up to the Valley. What would she say if he went two thousand miles away?

I want you to be happy. That’s what she would say, sure as God made Greek irregular verbs. And she’d be lying through her teeth. That was what the math guys called intuitively obvious.

“One thing at a time,” Bryce muttered, fishing his phone out of his pocket. First step was finding out what Susan thought.

His stomach rumbled, loud enough to startle his cat if only he’d had one. He stuck the phone back where he’d got it. No, first step was dealing with those leftovers. Whatever Susan thought wouldn’t change a hell of a lot in the next half hour. Yes, people were animals. Better not to be a hungry animal. He headed for the kitchen.

* * *

If there was a drearier place in the world than the Torrance office of the California Employment Development Department, Louise Ferguson couldn’t imagine what it might be. The way things looked to her, Satan would have had a tough time devising a drearier place in hell.

She sat on a hard, uncomfortable plastic chair of dispirited grayish blue in the waiting area. Water ran from her umbrella and puddled on the dispirited grayish brown linoleum under her feet. She’d had to walk several blocks from the bus stop to the EDD office. Three people on the bus were sneezing their heads off. She hoped she wouldn’t come down sick.

Somebody a couple of rows behind her in the waiting area coughed as if he’d smoked four packs a day for the past thirty years. The chill and the rain made people get sick more easily than Southern Californians were used to doing. When they weren’t sneezing and hacking, they bitched about it.

Louise wished San Atanasio had an EDD office. But Torrance was the biggest South Bay city, so such things aggregated here. She had to make the long bus trip instead of a short one. If she did catch something because of that, would the EDD care? It was to laugh.

The waiting area was packed. She counted herself lucky to have a chair. Whites, African-Americans, Hispanics, East Asians, South Asians, Samoans. . The crowd was as diverse as L.A. County. People chattered in English, Spanish, Japanese, Korean, something guttural that might have been Arabic or Farsi or Armenian for all of her, and in a language or two she couldn’t come even that close to identifying. She smelled stale sweat, stale booze, tobacco smoke clinging to clothes (you got in big trouble for trying to smoke in here), and assorted colognes and hair goops.

A middle-aged woman with a long, lined face and pulled-back hair who looked like an escapee from a 1920s elementary schoolteachers’ lounge stood up and used a bullhorn to cut through the buzz of talk: “Nine-thirty appointments! Take your places in the lines, nine-thirty appointments!”

People stood up and hustled to get into the lines that eventually put you face-to-face with an EDD clerk. A baby who’d been sound-and soundlessly-asleep while Mommy sat started screaming when Mommy got up. Mommy tried to comfort the kid, but didn’t have much luck.

Louise sat tight. She was a ten o’clock appointment. She’d got here early because that was how the bus schedule worked. Trying to jump the lines was an even worse sin than lighting a cigarette. You got an Official Black Mark on your record. A couple of those would cost you a week’s benefits.

Men and women who’d been standing took the chairs of those who’d risen to get in line. The waiting area didn’t empty out; new people kept coming in all the time. The SoCal economy sucked. The whole country’s economy sucked. Jesus H. Christ, so did the whole world’s. But the USA was screwed worse than everybody else.

If the government didn’t keep printing dollars and handing them out, no one would have any. If the government did keep printing them and handing them out, pretty soon they wouldn’t be worth anything. That was well on the way to happening. The prices these days! But Washington seemed to have decided that inflation at least put a Band-Aid on disaster.

Even though Louise had major doubts that that was wise, she grabbed everything the law said she was entitled to. If she lost the condo. . She had no idea what she’d do if she lost the condo. Live in her car with James Henry? Beg money or a room in the old house from Colin? If it were just her, she would sooner have jumped off a high building and ended things in a hurry. But you couldn’t do that when you had a little guy to worry about. She couldn’t, anyhow.

The refugee from whacking kids on the knuckles with a ruler raised the bullhorn to her mouth again. “Ten o’clock appointments!” she blared. “Take your places in the lines, ten o’clock appointments!”

Louise jumped up. All the lines were long, but one she particularly wanted to avoid. A chunky woman named Maria-Anglo, not Hispanic-proved that the EDD didn’t discriminate in hiring on the basis of race, gender, religion, national origin, sexual orientation, or competence. She always took twice as long to accomplish half as much as any of the other clerks. Some of the rest were better, some worse, but only fools and newbies got into the line that led to Maria. It was the shortest of them all-and with good reason.

Only a couple of minutes before ten now. So said the clock on the wall. It worked whether the power was on or not (it was this morning), which meant it ran on batteries. You got to try for your appointment at the scheduled time. You got it. . when you got it.

Slowly, she moved toward the window. The EDD wasn’t so heavily fortified as the post office on Reynoso Drive, but the windows were barred like the ones in an old-fashioned bank. The twenty-something guy in front of her wore a stingy-brim fedora that would have been ridiculously out of date when he was born but had turned hip again with the passage of the years. He also had on a loud houndstooth jacket; as far as Louise was concerned, that went beyond hip to tacky. From one of the jacket’s inside pockets he pulled out an airline-drink-sized bottle of vodka. He drained it in a quick gulp, then stuck it back in there again.

That was one way to make time in line go by. Bringing booze into the EDD office was Against the Rules, too, but Louise wouldn’t say anything unless the man in front of her got loud and rowdy. He didn’t seem likely to. He just wanted to numb the world a little. How could you blame him?

She’d got to within three people of the front of the line when the Asian woman at the window turned out not to have some bit of paper she needed. She didn’t savvy much English. The clerk, a prim white man with a neat gray mustache, knew not word one of whatever language she spoke.

The hipster in front of Louise performed a theatrical half turn. “Give me a fucking break!” he said, and then, faintly embarrassed, “Sorry about that.”

“Don’t worry about it,” she answered. “We could all use one.”

He grinned at her. “Yeah!”

After what seemed like much too long, the clerk got a rush of brains to the head and asked if any of his fellow civil servants could communicate with the Asian woman. The EDD personnel were as diverse as the people whose employment they were supposed to be developing. Sure as hell, somebody proved able to talk with her. Then they had to figure out what to do about the paper she didn’t have. Louise didn’t know what they decided; they still weren’t speaking English. But the woman left the window. By the unhappy look on her face, Louise guessed she’d have to come back when she found whatever the hell it was. With a loud sigh of relief, the blocky Hispanic guy behind her stepped up.

“He better have his shit together,” the man with the stingy-brim muttered darkly. Louise found herself nodding.

Evidently, the Hispanic fellow did. He stepped away from the window folding his check and sticking it in the right front pocket of his jeans. You’d better have your shit together, too, Louise thought as the hipster took his place. He must have, because he collected his check and got out of there in jig time.

“Name and Social,” the clerk with the gray mustache intoned as Louise took Mr. Stingy-brim’s place.

“Louise Ferguson.” She gave him her Social Security number, too.

He entered them on his computer keyboard. Next to it sat a mechanical gadget that let him issue checks even when the power went out. It had to date from the seventies, maybe earlier. It must have gone into a box as soon as the EDD computerized. That nobody’d thrown away the box, and that someone had known where to find it again, impressed and horrified Louise at the same time.

“All right, Ms. Ferguson, now I need to see the evidence that you’ve been actively seeking employment during the past fortnightly period,” the clerk said. Could anyone who didn’t work for the EDD bring out things like actively seeking employment or fortnightly period as if they actually belonged to the English language? Louise wouldn’t have bet six inches of used dental floss on it.

None of which had anything to do with the price of beer (high, like the price of everything else). Louise pulled out application letters from her purse and shoved them at the clerk. They were genuine, all right. She would have done anything short of turning tricks to escape the EDD’s clutches. Christ on a crutch, who wouldn’t? The only trouble was, nobody wanted to hire her. . or, by appearances, anyone else.

He shuffled through them and noted them in her computer file. Then he did the same thing on her file card (more boxes that must have been exhumed from storage). Grudgingly, he said, “This appears satisfactory.”

“Good,” answered Louise, who would have hit the ceiling in seventeen different places if he’d tried telling her anything else.

He poked one more key. The printer on a shelf by his monitor hummed and spat out a check that would let her eat-not well, but eat-and pay some of what she owed on the condo. Some of what she owed would come out of what she’d saved while she worked at Ramen Central. Sooner or later, her savings would run dry. What she’d do then-she didn’t want to think about now.

She put her applications and the check into the purse. Then she got out of there as fast as she could. Who hung around the EDD one second longer than they had to? Nobody, that was who.

It was still raining. It was raining harder than it had when she got there, in fact. Up went the umbrella. She splashed toward the bus stop. It was nothing but a bench-no roof or anything. Not many SoCal bus stops boasted roofs. How often did you need to keep off the rain here?

Often. . now. The Retarded Transit District needed to improve the stops like this one. And where would the money for that come from? Local government agencies needed to do a million other things even more. They didn’t have the money for those, either. Back in the day, they might have got it from Sacramento or Washington. But Sacramento had been broke before the eruption, and Washington was even broker than Sacramento. If that wasn’t a measure of how screwed Washington was, nothing ever could be.

A Hispanic woman came up to stand beside Louise. She had an umbrella, too. Pretty soon, they’d both be soaking wet from midthigh down. Bumbershoots helped only so much. “I wonder how late the goddamn bus is gonna be,” the Hispanic gal said.

“Late.” Louise heard the doleful certainty in her own voice. If some modern Mussolini promised to make the buses run on time, he’d get elected in a landslide. And then he’d break his promise, sure as hell. Money was scarce. Fuel was scarcer. Spare parts were damn near extinct, and nobody seemed to be making or buying more.

“You got that right.” The other woman took a pack of cigarettes out of her purse, extracted a cigarette from the pack, and lit it, all without getting wetter than she was already. Louise admired the dexterity as much as she wished she weren’t getting the secondhand smoke.

The cigarette did do one thing, though: it made the bus come. The Hispanic woman had to drop it, only half done, on the sidewalk to board. Serious fines backed up the rules against smoking on public transportation.

Far more bicycles than cars used the streets. Some pedalers wore raincoats that reached down to their ankles. Some-the dumb ones, as far as Louise was concerned-tried to manage umbrellas. Some just said the devil with it and got wet. The bus had to go slowly to keep from mashing them.

Every so often, the driver honked his horn to remind the people on bikes that he was there-and to make them clear out in front of him. He didn’t have much luck with that. The pedalers not only didn’t clear out; they slowed down to piss him off. Some of them flipped the bus the bird.

If Louise had sat behind the big steering wheel, she knew she would have wanted to run over two or three of them to encourage the others to get some sense. The driver clutched the wheel tight enough to make his knuckles whiten, so maybe he was fighting the same temptation.

People got on. People got off. Before the eruption, only the poor rode the bus in L.A. If you could afford a car, you drove one. Who could afford a car now? Hardly anyone, which meant the bus attracted a higher class of passenger than it had once upon a time. I’m on it, for instance, Louise thought, quite without irony.

She got off at the stop closest to her condo. The walk back got her wetter and did nothing to improve her temper. She checked her mailbox. The mail wasn’t there yet. She’d have to come down through the rain again to get it. And what would it be? Bills and ads. What else came these days?

“Mommy!” James Henry squealed when she walked through the door. He ran to her. She was the best thing that had ever happened to him: that was what that run said.

“Was he good?” she asked Marshall.

“Good enough,” James Henry’s half-brother answered. “Listen, Mom, I’ve got to go now that you’re finally back.”

“Not my fault the trip took so long,” Louise said. “The bus was impossible. And those selfish idiots on bikes only made things worse.”

Marshall’s eyes glinted. He’d ridden his bike over here to babysit. Was he one of the people who diddled buses for the fun of it? If he was, Louise didn’t want to hear about it. He did say, “It’ll cost you an extra twenty bucks.” His voice was almost as hard and flat as Colin’s.

“Twenty!” Louise spluttered indignantly.

“You’re late. Late, late, late. And you’re lucky I’m not saying fifty.”

Sharper than a serpent’s tooth. . ran through Louise’s head. But she paid him. Somebody who wasn’t related to her by blood would have squeezed an extra fifty out of her. She couldn’t afford it, but she didn’t want to take James Henry to the unemployment office in the rain, either. You couldn’t win. You couldn’t even come close.

That twenty, of course, came on top of what she’d to pay him to watch James Henry for as long as she’d thought she would be gone. She’d just spent a fair part of her unemployment check. Did Marshall care? Yeah, right!

Out the door and into the rain he went. Louise sighed. She knew she’d call him the next time she had to go to the EDD office. If she could call him. If her phone had power. If the cell towers had powers. Sometimes, these days, even old-fashioned landlines didn’t work, not that she had one.

“Mommy!” James Henry said again. We’re together again at last, he meant.

“Hi, kid,” Louise answered. Her own voice sounded hard and flat in her ears, too.