Supervolcano: All Fall Down

II

In the Year Without a Summer, back two centuries ago now, it had snowed in Maine in June. As a matter of fact, it had snowed in June as far south as Pennsylvania. Rob Ferguson knew more about the Year Without a Summer than he’d ever wanted to find out. The eruption of Mount Tambora, down in what had been the Dutch East Indies and was now Indonesia, touched it off. Mount Tambora had been one hellacious boom-two and a half times as big as Krakatoa, a lifetime later, though without such a good press agent.

And that hellacious boom was maybe-maybe-five percent the size of the Yellowstone supervolcano eruption. Guilford, Maine, had a park that ran along by the banks of the Piscataquis River. Rob stood in the park on the Fourth of July and watched snow drift down from a sky the color of a flock of dirty sheep.

“Boy, this is fun,” Justin Nachman said, his breath smoking at every word.

“Now that you mention it,” Rob answered, “no.”

“We could bail out,” Justin said, not for the first time. He played lead guitar and did most of the singing for Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles: he would have been Squirt Frog, had they reckoned things that way. He was short and kind of chunky. He’d worn a perm he described as a Yiddish Afro till the band got stranded in Guilford not long after the eruption. He hadn’t kept it up since, but his hair was still plenty curly.

“We could, yeah.” Rob’s words showed agreement; his tone didn’t. For a long time, getting into and out of Guilford had been as near impossible as made no difference. Rob had never seen, never dreamt of, so much snow in his life. He was from L.A., so that didn’t prove much. All the guys in the band were Californians; they’d come together at UCSB. But people who’d lived in Guilford their whole lives said the same thing.

Basically, Maine north and west of I-95 had been left to its own devices by a country that had bigger catastrophes to worry about than too goddamn much snow way the hell off in its far northeastern corner. Food, fuel oil, and gasoline stopped coming in. The power went out-not all at once, but now here, now there, till eventually nobody had any. The nineteenth century came back in a big way.

And the locals made it through better than Rob would have believed. They cut down a lot of second-growth pines. They shot a lot of moose and white-tailed deer and ducks and geese. Rob had shot a moose himself, with a rifle borrowed from Dick Barber, the proprietor of the Trebor Mansion Inn, the B amp; B where the band was staying.

Barber was a longtime Navy man who had a pretty fair arsenal. And Rob, a cop’s kid, knew what to do with guns. Except for occasional target practice with his father, he’d never used what he knew till this winter. Eating something you’d killed yourself, he discovered, made both the hunt and the following meals feel special, almost sanctified.

This time around, Justin didn’t want to let it alone: “It’s not as bad as it was. We can get to Bangor. The airport’s open. We can go anywhere we want.”

He had a point. . of sorts. It didn’t snow all the time any more-only some of the time. When it wasn’t snowing, it got warm enough so the stuff that had already fallen started melting. It had climbed all the way up into the sixties once or twice in June.

Roads emerged from under snowdrifts. Here and there, food and fuel started coming in, though it wasn’t as if the rest of the country had a whole lot to spare. It seemed to matter less than anyone would have dreamt possible before northern and central Maine got stranded.

“Sure. We can,” Rob said, again with that mismatch between tone and voice. “I bet we blow up the band if we do, though.”

Justin had expressive features. Right now what they expressed was annoyance verging on disgust. “Biff will come along if the rest of us decide to go back to civilization,” he said.

“Don’t bet anything you can’t afford to lose,” Rob said. Biff Thorvald played rhythm guitar. He was also the guy in the band who trolled hardest for girls. They all did some of it. What the hell was the point of playing in a band if it wasn’t to help you get laid? But Biff took it further than Justin or Rob or Charlie Storer, the drummer. The phrase hard-on with legs hadn’t been coined with him in mind, but it might as well have been.

Justin still looked annoyed. “He’s not that serious about Sarah or Cindy or whatever her name is.”

“Bullshit he’s not,” Rob retorted. Cindy-he thought that was her name-was a waitress at Caleb’s Kitchen, on Water Street. If Rob turned his head, and if the snow eased up a little, he could see the diner from where he stood. It was tolerable for breakfast, but hadn’t been much for lunch or dinner till they put moose stew and venisonburgers on the menu. Whatever her name was, Biff was all head over heels for her, and she was just as crazy about him.

“Oh, man!” Justin waved in frustration at the trees on the far bank of the Piscataquis. The ones that weren’t pines were mostly bare-branched. All the late frosts and snowfalls had screwed their leaf-growing to the wall. Rob wondered if they’d die. This was a town park, so nobody’d chopped them down over the winter. But if they were nothing but firewood waiting to happen. . Justin went on, “This is Nowhere with a capital N.”

“Uh-huh.” Rob admitted what he couldn’t very well deny. But he also said, “I kinda like it, y’know?”

The look Justin gave him had Et tu, Brute? written all over it. “You’ve got to be kidding me,” he said.

“Nope.” Rob shook his head. “Right after we got stranded, I would’ve kissed a pig for a plane ticket to, well, anywhere. But it grows on me, honest to God it does.”

“Like a wart.” Justin was not a happy camper.

“Look, dude, if you just gotta go, then you gotta go, and that’s all there is to it,” Rob said. “We’ll be sorry and we’ll miss you and all that good shit, but we won’t hate you or anything. The band’s not worth squat if the only reason you’re in it is you think you have to stay in it. If you leave, well, hell, we had a better run than most outfits do. We even made a living at it for a while.”

“Up from obscurity,” Justin muttered.

“Most outfits never make it that far,” Rob said. “They don’t call ’em garage bands by accident. The drummer’s loud and crappy and annoys the neighbors, and the guys say fuck it and get on with their lives. Coming as far as we have, we beat the odds.”

“We got all the way up to cult band,” Justin said.

He didn’t mean it in any good way, but Rob nodded even so. “We sure did, and it paid the bills. What’s wrong with that? I mean, would you rather play gigs or sit in a cubicle next to Dilbert and stare at a monitor all day?”

Justin flinched. He might have been stuck in a lab, not a cubicle-he was an escaped biologist. But one of the reasons you got into a band was so you wouldn’t get trapped in a nine-to-five. Of course, you could get trapped in a band, too. “Up from obscurity,” he repeated. “And then down to obscurity again.”

That was how it went. It wasn’t so exact as calculating where a missile that went up on this course at that angle with the other velocity would come down, but it came close. Nobody’d ever heard of you. Then people did hear about you, and you were as hot as you ever got. Then they started forgetting about you and looking for something new. But if enough people got to like you while you were It, you could still make a living on the afterglow.

Like really powerful missiles, a few bands went into orbit and never did come back to earth. Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles never would have been one of those; it was too quirky, and probably too smart for its own good. As long as everybody in the band accepted that, they could have fun anyhow.

Justin sighed now. “I know what it is. That Farrell guy’s got a mojo on you.”

“Oh, give me a break!” Rob said. “Everything around here would have gone to hell if he hadn’t pitched in.” Jim Farrell was a retired history prof; Dick Barber had helped run his failed campaign for Congress in the last election. The successful Democrat stayed in Washington. He showed no interest in sharing his constituents’ frigid fate. Farrell was still here, and better adapted to the new reality than most younger people. He also had a buglelike baritone that made people-people on this side of I-95, anyhow-take notice of him.

“He’s, uh, kind of out there.” By the way Justin said it, he was giving Farrell the benefit of the doubt.

Rob only laughed. “And we’re not?”

“Not that way.” A big, wet snowflake landed on the end of Justin’s nose. His eyes crossed, trying to focus on it. Then it melted, and they uncrossed again. He let out another sigh. “I guess I’m not going anywhere-for now.”

“Okay,” Rob said. If Justin waited much longer, winter would clamp down hard on Guilford once more-and on big stretches of the rest of the country, too. Snow in L.A. twice in one season? How crazy was that?

Crazy as a supervolcano eruption. You never thought it could happen. Then it did, and you had to live with the aftermath. . if you could.

Vanessa Ferguson checked the time on her cell phone. A quarter past three. She let out a sigh full of theatrical disgust. Part of that was because she had to meet Micah at four. The other part was because, although Camp Constitution had been up and running for almost a year, only little gadgets like cell phones had power here. And sometimes you stood in line for a couple of hours before you got to use the charging station, too.

She didn’t know how many refugee centers there were, set up just past the edges of the ashfall from the supervolcano. She did know they stretched from Iowa to Louisiana on this side of the eruption, and from Washington State down into California in the west. They all had patriotic-sounding names: Camp Constitution, Camp Independence, Camp Federalist, Camp Liberation, and on and on. Some FEMA flunky back in D.C. probably got a bonus for every fancy moniker he thought up.

She didn’t think anybody knew how many people remained stuck in these miserable camps. As with deaths from the eruption, she didn’t think anybody could guess to the nearest hundred thousand. Till she ended up here, she’d never imagined there was this much tent canvas in the whole U.S. of A. And if she never saw another MRE for the rest of her life. . it would mean they were finally running out of them, and then all the refugees would really be in trouble.

The roof over her head right now was olive-drab canvas. She sprawled on a bunk-next to the top in a stack of five. She had a two-inch-thick foam-rubber pad over the plywood bottom of the bunk. In Camp Constitution, that was luxury.

And this was a pretty quiet tent. That was luxury, too. The three little brats in the first tent where she’d washed up. . They couldn’t watch TV. They couldn’t play video games. They couldn’t get on Facebook. So they drove everybody nuts instead. Vanessa’d wanted to rip their little heads off. She didn’t suffer fools or pests gladly. But what you wanted to do and what you could get away with were two different critters, dammit.

Micah had got her out of there. Of course, everything came with a price. Pretty soon, she’d deliver another payment. Not long after she’d come to this tent, she’d figured she didn’t need to deliver any more. That only proved she’d been naive. Once you let somebody know what bugged you, you left yourself vulnerable to him.

Who would have dreamt Micah could find kids even more horrible than the ones she’d left behind? Well, he did it, damn him. These were boys, not girls, which only made them wilder. And there were four of them, not three. Their mother had long since given up trying to keep them under control. They had no father in evidence.

Just to make matters worse, they were African-American. If Vanessa complained about them through regular channels, she’d look like a racist.

So, irregularly, she went back to Micah. He raised an eyebrow. He looked surprised. “Is that so?” he said, and he sounded surprised, too, damn him. He was such a dweeb. “How unfortunate for you. I was not aware of the situation.” Another government agency called that kind of thing plausible deniability. Vanessa called it horseshit. She was learning.

“What can you do about it?” she asked him.

“I’m not sure,” he said. “If they were properly transferred into that residence area, I may not be able to do much at all.” Only a bureaucrat who didn’t have to live in one would call a surplus gynormous Army tent a residence area. And only someone who knew damn well he could take care of things if he decided to would deny it that way.

She’d paid off before, to get away from her first tent. That made picking it up again easier, but left her more disgusted with herself than ever. If Micah had been greedier. . But he wasn’t, not with any one person. Vanessa was as sure as made no difference that he had plenty of others coming around.

That African-American mother and her four monsters vanished from the tent as abruptly as they’d appeared in it. Everybody else breathed a sigh of relief. Vanessa breathed a sigh of resignation. Micah had delivered. Now she would have to deliver, too. She kept delivering, every couple of weeks, the way she would have kept up her auto-insurance payments out in the real world.

“Everything worked out for the best,” Micah told her one afternoon. “I was able to gain the Washington family access to a relocatable unit.”

Relocatable unit was more bureaucratese, this time for trailer. FEMA trailers had had an evil reputation since Katrina. The ones at Camp Constitution looked as if they’d been working hard at least since the hurricane hit New Orleans. They were the refugee camp’s equivalent of Beverly Hills anyway. Only large families got to stay in them.

“Yippee skip,” Vanessa had said, in lieu of Hot shit! She would rather have seen all four of the little gangbangers in cells.

Now she checked the time once more. Three thirty. The minutes just flew by when you were having so much fun. Yeah, right, she thought. She climbed down from her bunk: carefully, so as not to bother the people in the bunks below hers. They were as bored and miserable as she was. What else were places like Camp Constitution but breeding grounds for boredom and misery? She understood where Palestinian terrorists came from much better than she ever could have before the supervolcano erupted.

Camp Constitution lay somewhere between Muskogee, Oklahoma, and Fort Smith, Arkansas. It should have been up in the nineties, with humidity to match. But the sun shone pale from a sky drained of blue the way a vampire’s victim was drained of pink. It might have been seventy. Then again, it might not.

The breeze came out of the west. Vanessa slipped on a surgical mask. All kinds of volcanic ash and dust remained in the air, especially when the wind blew from that quarter. Coughing was one of the characteristic sounds of the camp. You didn’t hear it as much now as you had when the miserable place first opened, though. Most of the people who’d had lung troubles when they got here were already dead.

That breeze also brought the reek of row upon row of outhouses. There were showers-cold showers. There were spigots where you could fill bottles and jugs and whatever else you happened to have with potable water. And that was about the extent of the running water in these parts. A sewage system there was not.

People in ugly, ill-fitting clothes tramped the camp’s dusty, unpaved avenues. Vanessa knew she was one of them, knew it and hated it. Like everybody else here, she’d arrived with only what she had on her back. Everything else came from donations. She’d never seen-she’d never worn-so much polyester in so many garish colors in her life.

A real building, the only one in the camp, housed the FEMA functionaries who ran the place. They had electricity and plumbing and high-speed Internet access and all the other benefits of Western civilization. They were workers, after all, not refugees. They were there to help-if they happened to feel like it.

A long line of people snaked out the front door and down the street. Every one of them wanted something. Some would get it: the deserving, the persistent, or, sometimes, just the attractive.

Vanessa’s mouth twisted. On her, her father’s strong, blunt features looked good. She sometimes-these days, more and more often-wished they didn’t. But all you could do was play the cards you had. She’d used her looks to her advantage before. Like most nice-looking people, she’d sometimes done it without even noticing. In a way, she was still doing it. In a way. .

There was another door around the back. No line at this one. Just a sign next to it, with big red letters: FEMA STAFF ONLY. A guard wearing a Fritz hat and body armor and carrying an M16 stood there to back up the sign. Vanessa nodded to him; she’d been here before. “I have an appointment with Mr. Husak,” she said.

“Let me check.” He spoke into a telephone mounted beside the door. Hanging up, he nodded. “Go on in, then.”

Before she passed through the metal detector, she took a.38 revolver out of her purse and handed it to the guard. He accepted it without surprise; plenty of people in Camp Constitution packed heat. There were also metal detectors at the front door. There hadn’t been, till what the camp administration kept calling an unfortunate incident (three dead, seven wounded-yeah, that was unfortunate, all right) prompted their urgent installation.

She and the rest of the junk in her handbag passed muster. So she got to go inside. Everything in the building was, or should have been, achingly normal. Fluorescent tubes glowed behind frosted-glass panels set into the ceiling. Cheap, battleship-gray industrial carpet lay underfoot. Keyboards clicked. Before the supervolcano blew up, she’d worked in a place in Denver not too different from this. If you were stuck under canvas with nothing to look forward to but another MRE, it was a lost world.

A clock on the corridor wall said it was four straight up. Vanessa knocked on the second door past that clock. Micah Husak opened it. His smile showed a broken front tooth. “You’re right on time,” he said.

“Wonderful.” Vanessa was compulsively punctual. When she kept these appointments, she wished she weren’t. “Let’s get it over with, okay?”

The smile slipped. He wanted her to like him for the favors he’d done her. And he had done them, too. She wouldn’t have come here if he hadn’t. But wanting her to like him. . Hey, people in hell wanted mint juleps to drink. That didn’t mean they’d get them.

“Well,” he said. He closed the door and clicked the locking button in the center of the knob. Then he sat down in the swivel chair behind the generic office desk. He undid his belt, unzipped his slacks, and slid them down around his ankles. He hiked up his blue cotton dress shirt.

Vanessa got down on her knees in front of him. She took him in her hand and then, muttering, took him in her mouth. She sucked hard. She wanted to get it over with as fast as she could. A few minutes every couple of weeks, in exchange for living better than she would have otherwise. . A simple enough bargain, she’d thought so when she made it. Payback was a bitch, though, as it often was.

He opened his pale, hairy knees a little wider, trying to stretch it out. But he wanted to come, too. Just before he did, Vanessa pulled her head away so the nasty stuff landed on his belly and in his pubic hair.

She wiped her chin off on her sleeve. Micah Husak pulled a couple of Kleenexes out of a box on the desk and tidied himself up. “I wish you’d let me finish in your mouth,” he said peevishly.

“Forget it,” she answered as she got to her feet. “I don’t do that for anybody.” Not even for men I do like, she thought, but coming right out with that wouldn’t have been smart, even if it was true. She thought the idea totally gross. She’d got a bad-tasting, slimy surprise the first time she sucked a guy off, and she’d vowed then and there she’d never let it happen again. She hadn’t, either.

“Well,” Micah said once more. But a guy who’d just been blown wasn’t in the mood to do a lot of complaining. He wasn’t the first with whom Vanessa had seen that. As he set his clothes to rights, he went on, “I’ll see you in two weeks, then.”

“Yeah,” Vanessa said tightly. She was sure one of the reasons he didn’t insist more with her was that he had his other side girls. If he wanted to come in somebody’s mouth, no doubt he could.

Camp Constitution was a humongous place. And it was only one of too many, all depressingly alike. How much petty corruption like his went on in them? Lots and lots. She was all too sure of that. Enough so people on the outside didn’t get up in arms when some of it surfaced. Up in arms? Hell, most of the time they didn’t even notice. It wasn’t as if they didn’t have troubles of their own.

She couldn’t even slam the door behind her when she walked out of the little office. It had a compressed-air cylinder attachment at the top that thwarted tantrums. She left the administration building by way of the FEMA STAFF ONLY door. “Have a good one,” the guard said as he handed the pistol back to her.

“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!