Supervolcano: All Fall Down

IX

A bus up from downtown. The subway out to North Hollywood, which was on the fringes of the Valley. An express bus out to the heart of darkness (actually, in Los Angeles, the Valley was the heart of whiteness). Bryce Miller wondered if he should have taken his car, expensive though that was. Getting out here this way was a royal pain.

He could have used the car this once, yeah. If he had to do it every day. . He shook his head. Not a chance. From San Atanasio to here and back again was about seventy-five miles. Multiply that by Monday through Friday by gas at prices that would have made a European blanch before the eruption by the fact that half the time you couldn’t buy gas at any price at all, and what you got was Not a chance one more time.

If he did end up doing this, he’d have to move to the Valley. He couldn’t afford or manage to drive. For the third time, Not a chance. And this was a Saturday, and he’d left his apartment almost two hours ago, and he still wasn’t where he needed to be. Add four hours of daily commuting to a job and you’d be nutso in nothing flat.

Before the supervolcano went off, he wouldn’t have moved to the Valley on a bet. When you lived in the South Bay, the sea breeze spoiled you. It wasn’t quite perfect Santa Barbara, but it rarely got too hot or too cold. No sea breeze in the Valley; the Santa Monica Mountains blocked it off. Hard freezes during the winter? Temps that went up past 110 in the summertime? If you were a South Bay guy, you didn’t want thing one to do with any of that crap.

But that was before the supervolcano went off. The South Bay hadn’t just got hard freezes; it had got snow. So had the rest of the L.A. basin. And no way in hell any part of the basin would see 110 again any year soon. Hard to imagine you could get nostalgic for sweat, but human nature argued you could miss anything you didn’t have any more.

Christ, there were times he still missed Vanessa. It wasn’t that he wasn’t happier with Susan. In all the time they’d been together, he’d quarreled with her less than he had with Vanessa in a bad month-and they’d had several bad months in a row before she invited him to get lost.

And once in a while he missed her anyway. Part of it, he supposed, was that he hated getting anything wrong. Part of it was that she was the first one he’d fallen for hook, line, and sinker. And she’d fallen for him the same way.

When it was your first time, of course you thought it would last till the end of time. They’d gone to a wedding not long after they got together: a couple of her friends were tying the knot. A high school English teacher of hers who was there had asked them what they were going to do. Bryce remembered that very clearly.

He remembered what he’d answered, too: “We’ll live happily ever after.” And he remembered how that English teacher had laughed her ass off. He’d been pissed. Vanessa had been furious-almost furious enough to make a scene at Jack and Katarina’s reception.

Well, prune-faced Miz What’s-her-name got the last laugh. Happily ever after Bryce and Vanessa did not live. As for Jack and Katarina, they broke up before Vanessa showed Bryce the door. Shit happened. Boy, didn’t it just?

The bus stopped, liberating Bryce from his gloomy maunderings. The doors hissed open. He got off and looked around. If the guy wasn’t here. . Well, that was why God made cell phones-when the power let them work, anyhow. Today, it was on.

But a stocky man in his late thirties who’d been standing in the little bus station came forward with his hand stuck out. “You’re Dr. Miller, aren’t you?” he said. “I went to your Facebook page to see what you looked like. I’m Vic Moretti.”

“I’m Bryce Miller, yeah.” Bryce shook hands with Moretti, who, by his grip, might have been a construction worker when he wasn’t teaching. He wasn’t comfortable with Dr. Miller at the DWP, and he wasn’t comfortable with it here, either. After a longish pause, he managed “Good to meet you.” If this guy wanted small talk from him, he was in trouble.

“And you.” Moretti seemed very much at ease in his own skin. Maybe that was personality, maybe just years. Whatever it was, Bryce envied it. The older man went on, “My car’s right around the corner.”

It was a Prius. Bryce envied that, too. The less gas you used these days, the better. But some of the envy went away when he got into the hybrid. His knees banged the glove compartment. He might have been able to fit his legs around the steering wheel. He didn’t think he could have got them under it.

Moretti chuckled as he fastened his seat belt and started the car. “Helps if you’re not a big tall guy,” he admitted. “Me, I’m five-nine, and I’m fine in here.” He pulled out into what traffic there was. “So how much do you know about Junipero High?”

“Not a whole lot.” Bryce was sandbagging a little; he’d done his online homework, too. No point not showing that: “Your Web site says you’re one of the leading Catholic high schools in the West Valley. And Craigslist says you’re looking for somebody who can teach Latin and history. I can do Greek, too, if you want me to.” He liked Greek much better than Latin, though he wasn’t about to say so when Junipero was looking for a Latin teacher.

“Well, we can look into that a little further down the line,” Moretti said smoothly. He had to mean something like Greek? In a high school? You’ve got to be shitting me. Bryce didn’t get his bowels in an uproar about it. No matter how interesting he thought Greek was, only a handful of prep schools did offer it.

The Prius purred west. The Valley looked like any other part of the Los Angeles urban sprawl: houses, apartment buildings, shops, strip malls. Some of the billboards were in Spanish. So were some of the ones in San Atanasio.

Moretti took a couple of turns that got him off the big streets and onto little ones. Mountains loomed against the western horizon: not great big mountains, but a lot closer than the smudges on the horizon that were all you saw in the South Bay. Those couldn’t be the Santa Monicas. What were they, then? The Santa Susanas? Bryce realized how little he knew about the local geography. Back East, this might easily be a state or two away from him. Here, it was in the same county. The scale on this side of the country was different.

“Here we are.” Moretti swung into a parking lot. He stopped the car under the overhanging boughs of some pines that sprouted from the grass by the lot. When Bryce got out, he heard woodpeckers drumming in the trees. He glanced around. Some of the buildings looked as if they’d gone up earlier this morning. Others had probably stood there for fifty years or more, which made them ancient by Southern California standards.

“Nice campus,” he offered.

“It is, isn’t it?” Moretti agreed. “That’s one of the compensations for teaching here.” Bryce knew exactly what that meant: they paid bupkis. He’d have to take a serious cut if he bailed from the DWP.

Moretti led him to one of the blocks of classrooms. A key opened the room that turned out to be his. It looked like, well, a high school classroom. Instead of sitting behind his big wooden desk, he plopped down into the nearest steel-tube-and-plastic jobs the kids got stuck with. He waved Bryce into the one in the next row over. The easy assumption of equality made Bryce like him better.

“You’ve got a steady job that pays you more money,” Moretti said. “Why would you rather do this?”

Bryce had been wondering the same thing. When you got out into the real world, cash often seemed the most important thing there was. But he answered, “I can do the job I’ve got, but I’d sooner use some of what I studied and pass it along. There aren’t any university positions out there-the way things are these days, they’re shutting down classics departments, not hiring new people for them. So this looks like my next best bet.”

“I see.” Vic Moretti steepled his stubby fingers. “If a university post did come along, would you take it?”

“Of course I would.” Bryce wasn’t going to lie to him, not when he already had a job and wasn’t desperate to grab any spar in the sea. He did go on, “But I don’t think that’s likely. I only wish I did.”

“Hmm.” Moretti wrote something down. “You’re up front, anyhow. I’ll say that for you.”

Is he saying it for me or against me? Bryce wondered. Aloud, he said, “You may as well know where I’m coming from.”

“That’s true. We also needed to know whether your degree was genuine. We’ve had a couple of applicants who knew just enough Latin to order a pizza-if they didn’t want pepperoni on it.” The Junipero teacher looked thoroughly grim.

“Oh, wow,” Bryce said.

“Yeah.” Moretti nodded. “You were talking about how things are these days yourself. Some people watch too much poker on TV. They think they can bluff their way through anything. Maybe they hoped they could stay half a chapter ahead of the kids the first year, and then they’d have it psyched out. With priests on the faculty, though, that doesn’t fly.”

“I guess it wouldn’t,” Bryce allowed. “I can do the Latin. I can do the history, too. They make you learn it at UCLA.” He probably would have to stay half a chapter ahead of the kids for some of the more modern stuff, but that was one more thing he didn’t say.

“Professor Harriman thinks you can,” Moretti said.

Even though Bryce hadn’t expected anything else-he wouldn’t have listed his chairperson as a reference if he had-hearing that still warmed him. It also told him his chances of landing this job were pretty decent. Sure as hell, Moretti started talking about money, and about benefits. No, neither was on a par with what Bryce had now.

“When will I hear back from you?” he asked. Do I really want to do this?

“Within a week, I expect,” the older man replied. “We do have two or three other people who we think are legit, and we need to talk to them, too.”

“Okay. Fair enough.” Bryce said the polite thing. Whether he meant it. . As far as he was concerned, all those other people could geh kak afen yam, one of the handful of Yiddish phrases he knew.

Or could they? Do I really want to do this? he wondered again. He would be doing something he enjoyed a lot more than sitting in the DWP’s cubicle farm. And they would pay him a lot less for doing it, too. Could he scrape by on what they did pay him? If he didn’t think so, what was he doing here? Besides wasting his time and Vic Moretti’s, that is?

“Let me run you back to the bus stop,” Moretti said. “Boy, that’d be a hellacious commute from the South Bay. It wouldn’t be any fun if you could drive it, and bus and subway are a lot slower.”

“Unless the 405 clogs up,” Bryce answered dryly.

The teacher chuckled. “Yeah, there is that. But you probably would think about moving up here, huh?”

“It has crossed my mind,” Bryce said. As they walked down to the Prius, he went on, “I never thought I might end up at a Catholic school.” He didn’t say he was Jewish. Miller could be anything. Some people knew at a glance he was a Landsman. Others, especially the ones his red hair threw off, hadn’t a clue.

“It’s a Catholic curriculum, yeah,” Moretti said. “The kids-the kids are Valley kids. We’re maybe ten percent Jewish, including the quarterback on the football team. We’ve got Sikhs, Muslims, Hindus, Koreans. You name it, they’re here. Anybody who figures the Los Angeles Unified School District stinks-”

“Which means just about everybody,” Bryce put in.

“How right you are. And there’s a reason for that: LAUSD does stink. It’s great if you shuffle papers. But if you’re a student and you actually want to learn something. . I spent six years working at L.A. Unified. The nonsense you’ve got to put up with made me glad to take the cut that went with coming here. I can accomplish something here, you know?”

“That’d be nice.” Bryce wondered if he’d accomplished one single goddamn thing at the DWP. He’d kept a roof over his head and food on his table. In the larger scheme of things? Not so you’d notice.

He talked things over with Susan that night. They ate at a Chinese seafood place a couple of miles from his apartment. That was the kind of thing people used their cars for these days. “Whatever you want to do is fine with me,” she said. “Money. . If I worried about money, would I be messing around with the Hohenstaufens?”

The Western medieval world was a lot closer in time to the here and now than Bryce’s period was. In attitude? He doubted it. The Hellenistic Greeks could seem amazingly modern-and amazingly cynical. Of course, from what Susan said, so could Frederick II. But the Holy Roman Emperor spectacularly didn’t fit into his own time. Chances were he would have been right at home amongst the clever cutthroats who ruled Ptolemaic Egypt, Seleucid Syria, and Antigonid Macedonia.

Their food came. Seafood was local. Next to beef or lamb or chicken, it was also a bargain. People screamed about that all the time. They wanted Washington to Do Something. They wanted it louder every day, too. Just what Washington could do, they didn’t seem so sure. Retroactively declare the supervolcano hadn’t erupted, maybe.

People like that probably ordered unscrambled eggs when they sat down to breakfast at Denny’s, too.

All of which was beside the point. Bryce swallowed a tiny squid braised in hoisin sauce and came to the point: “If I take the job, looks like I’ll have to move up to the Valley. Will you come up there with me?”

“Live with you, you mean?” she asked. A squid of her own paused halfway between her plate and her mouth. She frowned a little; a vertical crease formed between her eyebrows. They never had lived together-she was old-fashioned about that. She’d spend the night at his place, and let him spend it at hers, but no more.

Bryce nodded, anyhow. “Uh-huh. It’s no farther to UCLA from there than it is from the South Bay. Closer, I think.”

She ate her squid. Then she said, “I don’t know,” in a way that told him she did know but was still looking for a way to soften the blow.

He took a deep breath. “It’d be okay if we got married, right?” He’d figured he would propose to her one of these days. He hadn’t figured this would be the one. Sometimes his mouth lived a life of its own, wild and free.

By the way Susan’s eyes widened, she hadn’t figured this would be the day, either. “Are you sure?” she asked.

Weren’t women trained not to give men a second chance when they popped the question? But if Bryce said he wasn’t sure now, they were finished. He nodded. “You bet I am.” He meant it, too. “Even if it means telling your dad I proposed at the same time as I was talking about taking a job that didn’t pay so well.”

“Could be worse. You might not have a job at all-plenty of academics these days don’t. Pop would really love that.” Susan paused, as if remembering she hadn’t answered the relevant question. She took care of that: “Yes, I’ll marry you, Bryce. You can even invite Lieutenant Ferguson if you want to-but not Vanessa, thank you very much.”

Not inviting Colin to his wedding had never occurred to Bryce. Neither had inviting Vanessa, even if she were in this part of the country. Had he been rash enough to invite her, he knew she would have said no. Actually, chances were she would have told him to fuck off and die. Once Vanessa was through with somebody, she was through with him. Forever and twenty minutes longer.

But thinking about one girl when he’d just successfully proposed to another one wasn’t the smartest thing he could do, even if Susan had been the one to bring up Vanessa. He reached across the table and took her hand. “I love you, you know,” he said. “The best I can.”

She nodded. “I know,” she said, accepting the qualification. “And I know that if you keep working for the DWP much longer, you’ll go right out of your tree. So if Junipero calls and tells you they want to teach their kids Latin, you do it, you hear?”

Bryce sketched a salute. “Yes, ma’am!”

Susan stuck her tongue out at him. “Just don’t let your eyeballs stick out on stalks when you stare at the cute ones.”

She tried to sound severe, but he knew she was kidding.

They went back to his apartment. He did his best to show where she satisfied his appetites. By all the signs, he satisfied hers, too. And wasn’t that the point of the happy exercise?

Vic Moretti called back five days later. He considerately waited till Bryce was home from the DWP. “You want the position, it’s yours,” he said without preamble.

“I want it,” Bryce said.

“You sure you know what you’re getting into?” Moretti asked. Maybe he was joking, and then again maybe he wasn’t.

Bryce didn’t care. . too much. “I know what I’m getting out of,” he replied.

Moretti paused. “Yeah, that counts, too,” he agreed thoughtfully. “Well, semester’s starting soon. It’s good to have the slot filled.”

“Good to fill it.” Bryce wondered whether he’d mean that five years-or even five weeks-from now.

* * *

James Henry Ferguson sneezed. Yellowish snot leaked from his right nostril. Dried, crusted boogers clogged the left one. He coughed and almost choked, but then didn’t quite.

“You poor thing,” Louise said. If anything was more pathetic than a sick baby, she had no idea what it could be. James Henry didn’t know what was wrong with him. He didn’t know he’d be okay again in a couple-three days. He didn’t know what a couple-three days were, or how to wait them out. All he knew was that he felt crappy.

“Mama!” he said, and started to bawl. That did nothing to improve the situation. His eyes leaked tears. His snot got runnier, which meant it oozed from both nostrils. Looked at objectively, he made a most uninspiring spectacle.

Louise wasn’t objective-nowhere close. Mothers weren’t equipped to be. If they had been, the human race would have died out long before it ever escaped from the caves.

Colin, now. . She remembered Colin surveying a sick kid-had it been Rob or Marshall? why couldn’t she remember? — and going, “Boy, he’s an ugly little son of a gun, isn’t he?” She remembered the clinical interest in his voice, and how much it had infuriated her.

If she’d been in touch with her feelings then, she would have walked away from the marriage on the spot. And if she had, her life now would sure as hell be different. Better? Worse? She hadn’t a clue. Different she was sure of.

The other thing she was sure of was that the OTC meds she was stuffing into James Henry weren’t worth shit. She was definitely in touch with her feelings about that. It made her mad, was what it did. Back when her other kids were little, you could buy stuff that actually made snot dry up. Sure, it’d come back as soon as the dose wore off, but it went away for a while.

No more, dammit. The FDA, in its infinite wisdom, had decided that the drugs that helped most kids also messed up fourteen in a million, or whatever the hell the number was. And so, to keep the fourteen in a million safe, the other 999,986 sniffled for a solid week whenever they caught a cold.

And they did catch them. Boy, did they ever! Babies and colds went together like ham and eggs. All the cold medicines on the drugstore shelves looked pretty much the way they had back when Louise was taking care of Rob and Vanessa and Marshall. Their boxes said things like SAFER THAN EVER! What that meant was, they didn’t do squat.

She cuddled James Henry. “Mama!” he said mournfully. He got snot on her shoulder even though she’d put a cloth diaper there to try to block that mucus. One more blouse she’d have to wash. At least snot didn’t stink the way spit-up did.

Her phone rang. James Henry jerked. He wasn’t as jumpy about the phone as a cat was, but he didn’t like it. The phone made her pay attention to something besides him, and he didn’t like that, either.

She fished the phone out of her purse. Marshall’s number was showing. “Hello?” Louise said.

“Yo.” That was Marshall’s way of talking, but it didn’t sound like him. It was too deep and too slow, and punctuated by a sneeze: “I better not come over there tomorrow. I’m-ah-choo! — sick.”

“So is James Henry,” Louise said. She didn’t quite remember how she’d got into the habit of always using both his first and his middle name, but she had. “Did you give him the cold, or did he give it to you?”

“Probably,” Marshall said. Again, the answer sounded like him even if the voice didn’t. Again, he sneezed. This time, he blew his nose right afterwards: a long, sorrowful honk. I wish James Henry could do that, Louise thought. Her older son went on, “Either which way, I feel like dog shit.”

Unlike his father, he wasn’t shy about swearing where women could hear. Chances were he hardly noticed he was swearing; to people of his generation, it was just the way they talked. Louise wasn’t offended. As far as she was concerned, Marshall’s casually foul mouth only proved Colin had wasted time and temper smacking him for cussing.

Right this minute, that was beside the point, no matter how gratifying it might have been some other time. Louise didn’t want to think about Colin, not when she could-and needed to-think of herself instead. “What am I supposed to do?” she asked. “How can I go to work tomorrow if James Henry’s sick and you can’t come take care of him?”

“Beats me, Mom.” Marshall sounded nearly as chilly and indifferent as his father might have. Maybe the cold helped, or maybe it was the triumph of one heredity over another. Then he added, “Don’t forget-I’m sick, too.”

Lost in her own worries, Louise had forgotten. She was briefly embarrassed, but only briefly. “What am I going to do?” she said-not quite a repetition, but close enough.

“Whatever it is, don’t put me in it.” Yes, Marshall could sound too damn much like Colin. And he’d always blamed Louise for walking out and getting free. He got only the first part, not the second. He took care of James Henry for money. He didn’t really care about his little half-brother. As if to underscore that, he went on, “I’ll check with you when I’m not so rancid any more. ’Bye.” Silence echoed in Louise’s ear: the Zen sound of a seashell that wasn’t there.

“Shit!” she said, most sincerely.

James Henry looked at her. “Shit,” he echoed, the way babies will.

She laughed so hard, she almost dropped him. He laughed, too, till he coughed and choked and sprayed boogers all over his cheeks. She wiped him off, saw he could have more of the worthless decongestant, and spooned it into him. He made a horrible face. It all seemed so unfair. If the crap didn’t do any good-and it didn’t-couldn’t it at least taste halfway decent?

She still didn’t know what she was going to do tomorrow. She couldn’t take James Henry to the ramen works. He’d only make everybody else sick. That’d thrill Mr. Nobashi, wouldn’t it? But she didn’t want to stay home, either. Waste a vacation day? She didn’t get enough of them to be happy squandering one on a sick kid.

Which left. . what? Anything? The Yellow Pages weren’t worth shit those days. She wouldn’t find a babysitting service there. She went online instead. She came up with several in the area. All of them said Se habla espanol. Which was great, no doubt, but how about ingles? Well, the only thing she could do was start calling and find out.

So she did. Sure enough, most of the people she talked with had accents flavored with Spanish. You got used to that in Southern California. What she had more trouble getting used to were the prices they wanted. If Marshall ever found out what they were asking, he’d yell for more himself.

“That’s just about what I bring home!” she yelped to one service that was particularly outrageous.

“Sorry, ma’am. We got to make a living, too,” replied the woman on the other end of the line. That might have been politer than Fuck you, lady, but it amounted to the same thing.

She ended up burning the vacation day. The professional babysitters were too goddamn professional for a mere human being to afford. Then she had to burn another one, because Marshall was still sick the next day. That got her through Friday. She dared hope things would be at least near normal by Monday.

Back when she first found out she was pregnant, her OB had asked her if she would take it out on the baby for blowing up the life she’d had. She’d denied the possibility-denied it indignantly, in fact. Now. . Now she would have been a liar if she said the idea of punting James Henry didn’t cross her mind.

She didn’t do it. By Saturday afternoon, the baby was pretty much his old cheerful self again. . and Louise had a scratchy throat and a tickle in her nose. You couldn’t win. The way things looked, you couldn’t even break even. That crossed her mind just before she started sneezing.

* * *

There were times when Marshall Ferguson felt as if he’d never gone to college. Here he was, in the house where he’d grown up-in his old room again, for God’s sake! He had more money in his pocket than he’d enjoyed before he went up to Santa Barbara, but not enough more to move out on his own. If his mother hadn’t had her little bastard, he wouldn’t even have had that. The economy had fallen, and it couldn’t get up. He wondered-and wondered seriously-whether he’d die of old age before it managed to climb to its feet again.

And there were times when he thought he’d fallen into the looking glass, just like Alice. Dealing with his mother as a near-enemy would do that to him. However much he tried, he couldn’t think of her any other way now. She’d blown up the family. What else was he supposed to think about her?

His dad’s new wife. . He liked Kelly. He liked her better than he liked the woman who’d given him birth. But she didn’t seem like a mother to him, or even like a stepmother, however a stepmother was supposed to seem (what he knew about stepmothers was a weird mash-up of fairy tales on the one hand and friends and acquaintances whose folks had divorced and remarried on the other).

What she really reminded him of was a new older sister. He also liked her better than he’d ever liked Vanessa, though. Why not? She didn’t try to boss him around the way Vanessa always had. She didn’t make as if she knew everything there was to know, either. She just. . got along with him. He wasn’t remotely used to that.

He would have liked to talk it over with Dad. His father was the one unchanged point in his life. Dad might be a little grayer, a little jowlier, than he had been when Marshall was in high school, but how often did you notice that? His style hadn’t changed, not a nickel’s worth. And wasn’t the style the man himself? Somebody’d said that. Marshall couldn’t remember who. So much for the bachelor’s degree they’d finally made him take.

But, because Dad was Dad, Marshall couldn’t imagine talking to him in any serious way. Dad would listen. He’d listen hard, like the cop he was. And then he’d give forth with something that might as well come from Mars. Which was one reason Marshall didn’t try talking with him: he’d had that happen before. The other reason, of course, was much older and more basic. Marshall had expended a lot of time and testosterone gaining such flimsy independence as he had. Was he going to risk that for the sake of conversation? Like hell he was.

And so he had to find some other way to channel his confusion. He put it into a story. Not only was he channeling it, he was giving himself a chance to make some money from it. He did sell things-less often than he wanted to, but he did. The money was nice, but he couldn’t begin to live on it. Nobody could live on what you made from short fiction. Everybody said so, and for once everybody seemed right.

He could talk about that with Kelly: no testosterone involved there. She thought for a little while, then said, “Maybe you should write a novel.”

“A novel? Are you nuts?” Marshall made a cross with his two index fingers, as if trying to protect himself against vampires. “I couldn’t write a novel!”

“Why not? You sell some of what you write.” Kelly was painfully precise-even more so than Dad. Did that go with being a geologist or just with being her? Marshall wasn’t sure, but either way. . She went on, “That’s got to mean you’re good enough, right?”

“Jeez, I dunno,” Marshall muttered. What he did know was that the idea of tackling a novel scared him shitless.

Kelly didn’t want to let it go. “You can make a living on novels, can’t you?” she asked.

“If you’re lucky enough, maybe.” Marshall didn’t want to admit anything. But she had a point, or the blogs and Twitter feeds and bulletin boards he haunted made him think she did. You wrote short stories for glory or experiment or because you liked a little idea so much you couldn’t not write it. Novels, now, novels paid bills-except when they didn’t.

“So go for it. What have you got to lose?” Kelly could be most infuriating when she sounded most reasonable.

“My mind?” Marshall suggested. One more thing everybody always said was Don’t quit your day job. Considering that his day job was taking care of his half-brother, dumping it didn’t seem half bad. It wasn’t that he had anything personal against James Henry. The baby was probably as nice as a baby was gonna be. He couldn’t help it that, just by coming along, he’d fucked up a whole bunch of lives.

Being able to tell Mom to find somebody who really was a babysitter, though? That sounded pretty good. If he never messed with another poopy diaper as long as he lived, he wouldn’t shed one single, solitary tear. Dad always claimed babies weren’t really human till they got potty-trained. Marshall hadn’t known about that one way or the other before. He believed it now.

Making real money, grown-up money, sounded pretty good, too. Zero chance of doing that with short stories. Your chances of doing it with novels weren’t what anybody would call good, but they weren’t zero, either. People did make a living writing novels. One or two of them even got rich.

All the same. . “I mean it, Kelly. I’ve never had an idea that big.”

“How hard have you looked?” she asked.

He didn’t answer that. He had no idea how or why ideas came, or why sometimes they didn’t. Maybe the Idea Fairy was spending a couple of weeks on the beach at Maui, working on her tan. Maybe the bulb in his story-detector light burned out, and he didn’t notice it for a while. He had no clue.

“Um, Marshall. .” Kelly’s voice changed. It was as if she’d suddenly realized she didn’t know everything there was to know. So Marshall thought, anyhow, but he was feeling harassed right then.

“What is it?” he asked, more roughly than he might have.

She bit her lip. “Just so you know, your father and I are trying to have a baby. So there may be another half-brother or half-sister on the way for you. I didn’t think it should be a surprise if it happens.”

“How about that?” Marshall said, which was safe almost all the time. His first reaction was Oh, Christ! I’ll never get away from diapers! His second reaction made him giggle. Kelly raised an eyebrow the way Dad would have-damned if they weren’t rubbing off on each other. Marshall explained: “Here I’d have two new half-sibs, and they wouldn’t be related to each other at all. How bizarre is that?”

“Pretty much,” Kelly allowed. “Your father said the same thing about you and Rob and Vanessa when we started trying.”

“Oh, yeah?” Marshall pondered that. Nothing he could do about it, he decided-Dad had had a lot longer to rub off on him than on Kelly.

“Uh-huh.” Kelly got back to the main track: “Is it bizarre enough to be a novel idea?”

It was novel to Marshall, all right, whether it was to his father or not. Then he realized that wasn’t what she meant, or not all of what she meant. He shrugged. Maybe it was. Maybe.