Supervolcano: Eruption

VII

Berkeley. Colin Ferguson always felt he needed a passport when he came up here. The People’s Republic of Berkeley, cops called it. Cops called Santa Monica, the L.A. beachside suburb, the People’s Republic, too. Damn few cops had an idealistic view of human nature. Jerks and assholes-that was what their world boiled down to.

“Holy shit!” he said happily. That was a parking space, right around the corner from Kelly’s apartment building. Parking spaces in Berkeley were even harder to find than Republicans. He had to parallel-park to get into this one, but he did it. It wasn’t even a two-hour zone; he could stay as long as he wanted. He put on the Club and got out.

There wasn’t any secure entrance at her building. People just went in and out. Most of the ones who did looked like college students. That didn’t automatically make them princes among mankind, as Colin had reason to know. But Kelly said she’d never had her apartment broken into, and her car only once. Plenty of folks in places with better security had worse luck.

A girl-well, she was around Vanessa’s age, which made her a girl to Colin-coming down the stairs gave him a curious look as he climbed them. She didn’t say What’s an old fart like you doing here? — her eyes did it for her. But as long as Kelly thought Colin belonged, he could suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous near-adolescents just fine.

He knocked on her door. She did have a little spy-eye so she could see who was there. And she had a dead bolt. It snicked back. Then she threw the door wide. The smile on her face was bottled sunshine. “Hey!” she said, and threw her arms wide, too.

They hugged with the door open. Then he went all the way in, and she closed it behind him. Phone calls and e-mails and texts kept them up on what they were doing. But not being able to get together all the time made the times when they could that much sweeter.

In between kisses, they went through variations on How are ya? How ya doin’? for some little while. Colin bragged about his parking fu. Kelly looked suitably impressed. She knew how lucky you needed to be to cadge a space anywhere in the Bay Area.

Kelly’s place looked quite a bit like Bryce’s-quite a bit like most grad students’ apartments, Colin suspected. Books and papers and printouts were scattered everywhere. She wasn’t compulsively neat about things the way he was. That didn’t mean she couldn’t find whatever she needed, though. He’d seen her pluck a journal out from under a blizzard of papers so she could check something in an article. He had no idea how she knew it was there, but she did.

She pulled Anchor Porters out of the refrigerator. They clinked bottles. “What’s the latest on the park?” he asked. Unless you had to fly cross-country, the volcano was old news by now. It wasn’t on CNN much any more. Even the late-night talk-show hosts left it out of their monologues.

“Still massively fucked,” Kelly answered-she was much easier swearing around himan he was around her. “I mean massively.”

“Is the road down to Jackson still closed?”

“Oh, you bet. The whole Pitchstone Plateau is going back to being a lava field,” she said. Colin must have looked blank, because she explained: “When you drive down-drove down-from Yellowstone Lake to the park’s south entrance, you were driving across the Pitchstone Plateau. It’s what happens to a lava field after it weathers for a hundred thousand years or so.”

“Pines,” he said, remembering. “Lots and lots of lodgepole pines.”

“Uh-huh.” Kelly nodded. “They can grow on almost zero nutrients, so they spring up first. Of course, a gazillion acres of them burned back in 1988, and now they’re burning again.”

“I bet they are,” Colin said. Even after all these years, the charred lodgepole pines, some still upright, some fallen and more than half hidden by their upspringing descendants, others lying out in the middle of what was now grassland, remained a big part of what you saw-had seen-at Yellowstone. “What’s the Park Service going to do when tourist season rolls around again?”

“Cry,” Kelly answered, which startled a snort of laughter out of him. She went on, “They ought to close it up completely, but that’d cost ’em God knows how many hundred million dollars.”

“How much would getting tourists swallowed up in a big eruption cost ’em?” Colin asked, not altogether ironically. Governments and corporations did risk-benefit analyses all the time, weighing whether lawsuits from a foul-up were likely to cost more than not fixing what was wrong. Of course, they couldn’t fix it here, but they could hope it didn’t get any worse.

“That’s what they’re wondering, all right,” Kelly thought along with him. “From what I hear, right now the plan is to let people in to see Mammoth Hot Springs and the other stuff way at the north end of the park, but to keep the rest of it off-limits.”

“Maybe that’s far enough away,” Colin said. You didn’t think about Yellowstone’s immensity till you were actually there. It was bigger than some of the little states back East.

“Maybe.” But Kelly didn’t sound convinced.

“You’re worrying about the supervolcano.”

“You bet I am. If it goes, Mammoth Hot Springs aren’t far enough away. Jackson isn’t far enough away.” She took a long pull at her beer. You weren’t supposed to drink porter like that, which didn’t stop her. “Hell, Denver isn’t far enough away.”

Colin grunted.

Kelly looked at him in surprise. Then she nodded. “Oh. Your daughter’s in Denver. I forgot.”

“Yeah. She is.”

“Can you tell her to come back to Socal?”

“I can tell her all kinds of things. Whether she’ll pay any attention-that’s a different story. What I say about Vanessa is, she’s hard of listening. She goes her own way, no matter what.” Most of the time, Colin would have thought that was a good thing. Rob did, too, and Colin admired him for it-reluctantly, but he did. Here, though.. “What are the odds it’ll blow?”

“The odds? Nobody has any idea. A lot of geologists hope the Ranger Lake eruption will take off some of the pressure down below.”

“You donelieve it.” Colin had listened to too many people telling too many stories to have any doubts on that score.

Kelly shook her head. “No. I don’t. I wish I could, but I don’t. Remember how Coffee Pot Springs started going nuts? Things there are crazier than ever. More geyser eruptions there than at the Upper Geyser Basin with Old Faithful and all the rest. Swarms of people would go to see ’em if the place weren’t miles from the nearest road.”

Picturing a park map in his head, Colin remarked, “That’s a long way from Ranger Lake.”

“It sure is,” Kelly said, and left it right there.

Maybe Colin should have, too, but what kind of cop would he have made if he believed in letting well enough alone? “If there’s a serious risk it will blow, shouldn’t they make some kind of plan?”

They’d gone around that barn before. Kelly, he realized too late, would have spent a lot more time brooding and talking about it than he had. It was… It was her South Bay Strangler, was what it was. “I used to think so. I really did. For a long time,” she said slowly, and spread her hands. “Now? I just don’t know any more. It’s too damn big. How do you make a plan that says We need to evacuate the whole Midwest-and that’s just for starters? You don’t. You can’t. The best you can do is hope it doesn’t happen. Pray, if you think praying helps. It won’t hurt.”

“Like not being there when the H-bomb goes off,” Colin said.

“Well, yeah.” She barely gave him the benefit of the doubt. “Only this is so much bigger than an H-bomb, it ain’t even funny.”

She meant it. He’d grown up at the tail end of the Cold War. Imagining something that dwarfed mankind’s finest warlike foolishness took mental muscles he wasn’t used to exercising. “The biggest thing ever, huh?”

“Not ever,” Kelly said seriously-he might have known better than to say something like that to a geologist. “A really big supervolcano will blow out maybe six hundred cubic miles of rock.”

“Yeah, you’ve said so before.” He nodded. “That’s a lot of rock.”

“It sure is. But 250,000,000 years ago the Siberian Traps let loose a thousand times that much lava-enough to bury about ninety percent of the Lower Forty-eight. And sixty-odd million years ago, the Deccan Traps coughed up enough lava to bury Alaska, pretty much. So the supervolcano’s small potatoes next to those, even if it’s plenty big enough to screw us to the wall.”

“Sixty-odd million years ago,” Colin echoed. “Isn’t that when the dinosaurs went under? I thought an asteroid was the number-one suspect for doing them in.”

“An asteroid sure hit then. Whether that was what finished them or whether the Deccan Traps had more to do with it… People are still writing papers. And the Siberian Traps happened about the same time as the even bigger extinction between the Permian and the Triassic.”

“How about that?” Colin said tonelessly. In the scale of things she considered, the South Bay Strangler wasn’t worth noticing. He couldn’t think so big, much as he wished he could. Even-even! — the supervolcano was beyond his comprehension. “You have any other good news?”

“Well, the sun could go nova and fry the whole planet like a pork chop.” She sounded cheerful, of all things. And she told him why: “But it won’t go supernova. It’s not massive enough, poor thing.”

“Aww,” he said, which got a laugh out of her. “You start thinking about stuff like that, what can you do about it?”

“Not one goddamn thing. So why don’t we get drunk and screw?” Kelly said. He wondered if she knew that was a country song from before she was born. He doubted it like anything; her taste in music didn’t run that way. But it struck him as a terrific idea even so.

Justin Nachman charged into the dressing room at Neptune’s Resort waving a New Yorker around as if he intended to swat a fly with it. The dressing room was tiny and cramped and hot, and several flies were buzzing around. As far as Rob Ferguson could see, everything in New York City was tiny and cramped-except for the stuff that was enormous and mind-blowingly magnificent. Every bit of it, squalid and stupendous alike, was insanely overpriced.

The cover of the New Yorker, as Rob finally discovered when Justin stopped brandishing the magazine, was a photorealistic painting of an entrance to Yellowstone Park, with a brand-new volcano with a Fujiyama-style perfect cone sending up smoke and fire in the background. The sign at the entrance read CLOSED NEXT 1,000 YEARS. A long line of cars and motor homes stretched away in disappointment.

Seeing it reminded Rob of his father’s girlfriend. He shied away from that. He wanted things back home to be the way they were supposed to, which to him meant Dad and Mom together. He understood that what he wanted wasn’t about to happen. He’d understood that maybe even before Dad did. Understanding it was a long way from liking it, though.

“What are you doing with that thing?” he asked Justin.

Before the band’s front man could answer, Charlie Storer added, “It’s last week’s, anyhow.” The drummer actually read the New Yorker sometimes. Justin rarely read anything but e-mail and texts these days. He’d got over his biology degree bigtime.

Now, though, he opened the magazine to the front section in smaller type. “We’re in ‘Night Life-Rock and Pop’!” he burbled.

That got his bandmates’ attention, as he must have known it would. “Well, what’s it say?” they chorused, or words to that effect. Biff Thorvald might have been the loudest of them. Then again, so might Rob or Charlie.

“‘Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles bring a musical sensibility that mixes Cowboy Bebop with Bebop Deluxe from Oxnard, California, to Manhattan,’ ” Justin read.

“Oxnard!” Biff exclaimed in disgust. Oxnard was a gritty, grimy, working-class town closer to L.A. than to Santa Barbara, and had about as much in common with the latter as Passaic, New Jersey, did with the Hamptons. Charlie made gross-out noises, too.

“Yeah, I know. It all looks the same from this side of the country,” Justin said.

Rob thought of an old surreal map he’d seen: the USA from New York City’s viewpoint. About half of it was this side of the Hudson. Then there was upstate, Pennsylvania, Texas, and California, with a palm tree sticking up out of the Pacific to show Hawaii. Evidently, that kind of attitude lived on.

“I wasn’t done yet,” Justin said. He took a deep breath and read some more: “ ‘Under his Brillo fright wig, lead singer Justin Nachman effectively puts across the up-and-coming band’s quirky lyrics.’ ” He patted his Yiddishe Afro. “Me and Dylan, right?”

“In your dreams,” Charlie said sweetly.

“Your wet dreams,” Biff agreed.

Of course Rob razzed Justin, too. No responsible band member could do anything else. But at the same time he chewed on the New Yorker ’s assessment. Could you mix anime and one of the stranger British outfits from the 1970s? If you could, did Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles do it? That wasn’t altogether impossible, he supposed. But it struck him as more likely that the music writer was just getting cute.

Justin’s thoughts went in a different direction. They often did. He started waving the magazine around again. “Not the cover of the Rolling Stone, but as close as we’re likely to get,” he said.

The others nodded. Rob would have loved to make the cover of the Rolling Stone. That implied serious success; serious sales; with luck, even serious money. He knew it wasn’t in the cards. The music writer nailed the reason why, too. Quirky could get you to up-and-coming. To serious success? Not likely.

“Does the notice talk about Snakes and Ladders, too?” Charlie asked. That was an important question, all right. If the New Yorker didn’t mention the opening act, they’d get pissy about it, and who could blame them?

“I think so. Lemme check.” Justin opened the magazine once more. Hadn’t he already looked? If any of them was going to go all rock star, he was the guy. He was the one the New Yorker ’d mentioned by name, after all. But nobody’d put his ego ahead of the band yet. They’d been good about that, better than a bunch of outfits that had fallen apart for the sake of somebody’s usually aborted solo career. Justin read again: “‘With them is another California band, Snakes and Ladders, with a distinctive twang.’ ”

It was a mention, yeah, but not one that would thrill the other band. Their lead guitarist wanted to be Robin Trower, or maybe Hendrix (a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?). No, a distinctive twang wouldn’t make Lenny turn handsprings.

“Put that thing somewhere,” Rob said. “If they haven’t seen it, don’t show it to them. Don’t talk about it, either.”

By all the signs, Justin wanted to blow up the little notice till it was about the size of the tablets the Lord had given Moses on Mt. Sinai. He wanted to carry it around with him the way Moses had carried the tablets down the mountain, too. No, nothing wrong with his ego, not a bit. But he wasn’t to the point where he needed another chair for it. He might nod reluctantly, but nod he did. And he opened the case of a guitar he wasn’t planning on using tonight and stashed the New Yorker inside.

The way Snakes and Ladders played showed that they, or at least Lenny, had seen the notice. He tried to coax licks from his guitar that should have been illegal, or more likely impossible. And sometimes he did, and sometimes he sounded like a man trying to strangle a cat that didn’t feel like getting strangled.

It must have been an exhausting set to play. It sure as hell was an exhausting set to listen to, for Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles and for the crowd that packed Neptune’s Resort. The applause that followed it seemed more like relief than anything else.

A voice spoke from the heavens: “Now welcome Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles!” If God had been a classic-rock FM DJ, He would have sounded a lot like that.

More relieved applause cme as the band walked out on stage. Some of the relief, Rob judged, was that they weren’t Snakes and Ladders. You didn’t always know what you would get with SF and the ETs, but brooding angst wasn’t a big part of the mix.

Rob waved as he took his place behind Justin. He looked out over the crowd before the lights went down, scouting for cute ones. Who didn’t do that? Cute ones were a main reason for joining a band to begin with. And New York City offered a variety he hadn’t seen since the last time they played in Socal.

Justin waved, too. “Good to be here,” he said, sounding calm and sane-to anyone who knew him, an illusion, but a soothing one at the moment. “I always wanted to play Carnegie Hall.”

He got a laugh. The club was packed with people in jeans and T-shirts, not the fancy-dress crowd Rob imagined at Carnegie Hall. They sat on metal folding chairs. Carnegie Hall would have had better, softer, wider seats. Something in the air said a good part of the crowd hadn’t showered any time lately. Once upon a time, tobacco fumes-among others-would have added to the fug. Nowadays, New York City’s public antismoking rules were as ferocious as anybody’s. Which, of course, didn’t stop the band from taking a few tokes before going on.

Being an engineering major, Rob had lately designed an experiment to see if he played better stoned. He’d listened to recordings of himself both wasted and straight. There didn’t seem to be much difference one way or the other. He still liked getting loaded, though, so he did.

Other guys who’d played New York had warned that fans there were different from fans in Indiana or Idaho. “If they like you, man, they really like you,” somebody’d said in wonder. “They know your shit better than you do.”

After two songs, three people in different parts of the room shouted for “Brainfreeze” at the same time. Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles hadn’t played “Brainfreeze” in at least two years. Rob had written the song, and even he didn’t like it any more. It appeared on no album. As far as he could recall, it had never been recorded. How did these dudes-no, one was a gal-even know it existed?

Justin shook his head. His poufy perm wobbled. “We aren’t taking requests yet,” he said firmly.

Other guys who’d played New York also said fans there didn’t want to listen to shit like that. They soon proved right. The crowd yelled requests between songs and even during songs, which got old real fast. But the band had Marshall stacks and the audience didn’t. The guys on the stage could play over the crowd; the converse wasn’t true. A murmur to the sound man let them do just that.

And the crowd didn’t seem to mind. New York bands had attitude. Maybe they expected their fans to show attitude, too. They damn near brought down the low ceiling when they whooped and hollered after the set, and again after the encore.

Then the band set to huckstering. CDs and posters sold briskly. “I already downloaded the music,” one girl told Rob as she bought a disk, “but I can’t download your autographs.”

“Darn right,” he agreed, scribbling his on the cover insert with a Sharpie. She paid cash, too. He approved of that. So did all his bandmates. They split the greenbacks into four equal piles after every gig. What Uncle Revenue didn’t find out about wouldn’t hurt him one bit.

Over on the other side of the anteroom, Snakes and Ladders were shilling, too. They were trying, anyhow. But next to nobody wver to them. Lenny’d put the fear of God in people, all right. That was fine for a fire-and-brimstone preacher, not so good for a rock ’n’ roller.

The other guys in his band seemed to be trying to talk some sense into him. He tossed his head. His mane flew. He didn’t want to hear it. The more they talked, the angrier he got.

He finally lost it. “Will you assholes just shut the fuck up!” he screamed, loud enough to make everybody stare at him. Hideously uncomfortable silence slammed down.

“Well,” Justin said after a moment, “isn’t showbiz fun?” Enough people chuckled-some nervously, but even so-to let Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles, if not Snakes and Ladders, get back to the serious business of separating customers from their money.

“We’re supposed to go to Connecticut with them, and Massachusetts, and on up into Maine,” Rob whispered to Charlie Storer. “What do we do if they break up?” It happened all the time, which didn’t mean it didn’t screw things up when it did. Divorces were usually expensive and inconvenient. Rob thought of his folks again.

“What do we do?” The drummer considered, but not for long. “We damn well do without, that’s what.”

Rob grunted. Charlie was much too likely to be right. Maybe they could hook up with some local band that wanted to swing through New England. That might work… if they could find a band that felt like touring… if the two outfits didn’t clash like plaid and paisley… if… if… if…

Then Rob stopped worrying about it. The young woman who set down a CD cover insert to be signed was so pretty, she should’ve been against the law. No hulking boyfriend loomed behind her, as happened much too often. When Rob found out her name was Jane, he instantly wanted to be Tarzan.

He wasn’t dumb enough to tell her that. Instead, sounding as California cool as he could, he said, “Why don’t you hang around if you’re not doing anything else later on?”

About half the time, a girl would say she couldn’t possibly because her hamster had the heartbreak of psoriasis. The other half.. Jane gave back a megawatt smile. “You mean it?” she breathed. “For sure?”

“For sure,” Rob said solemnly. “Cross my heart and hope to…” Dying wasn’t what he had in mind right then. The little death, maybe-no, definitely-but not Mr. Big. “C’mon around to this side of the table. We’ll find you a chair or something. Or what the hell? You can just sit on my lap.”

It wasn’t quite You can just sit on my face. But it also wasn’t a line most guys could try on a girl whose last name they didn’t know yet. Damned if Jane didn’t, though. She started running her fingers through his hair, which distracted the hell out of him when he tried to sign the next autograph.

Yeah, he thought, setting a hand on her leg while kind of pretending to steady her. Oh, fuck, yeah. This is why I do this stuff. What better reason was there?

Louise Ferguson took her sorry office skills to a sorrier job at one of the sorriest offices she’d ever seen. It was the American headquarters for a company that imported Japanese ramen into the States. When she’d first married Colin, Braxton Bragg Boulevard had been one of San Atanasio’s main drags. These days, steel-barred fencing topped by coils of razor wire surrounded the ramen importer’s parking lot. Fencing like that could have kept out the Taliban The importer needed a full-time security guard along with it. Even so, as soon as Louise walked into the building, a woman hissed at her in a harsh farm-belt accent: “You didn’t leave anything out there you care about, didja?”

She shook her head. “Nope.” She usually thought of her years being a cop’s wife as a total waste. But they’d left their mark on her, all right, often in ways she didn’t even notice.

She wasn’t much surprised when the inside of the office proved as big a Wild West show as the parking lot. Her boss was a Mr. Nobashi. He was about as inscrutable as a fireworks display. He spent most of the time talking to the home office in Hiroshima in impassioned Japanese interspersed with things like “Ohh, Jeesus Kerrist!” and “goddamma son of a bicha!”

When he wasn’t swearing, he spoke tolerable if schematic English. He showed Louise the spreadsheets she was supposed to ride herd on. Her heart sank when she saw them. They were enormous and complicated, and Excel had always disagreed with her every chance it got. She had the feeling it would get plenty here.

“Well, I’ll try,” she said doubtfully. If Mr. Nobashi didn’t get his hopes up real far to begin with, he wouldn’t be too disappointed later on. She could hope not, anyhow.

“You no try! You do!” he declared.

She nodded. What else could she do? You do was what she was here for. If she couldn’t do, what was the worst thing that would happen? He’d fire her, and she’d have to try to land another job somewhere else. Somewhere better than this? Maybe, but the odds were against it. This seemed to be the kind of place where jobs lived these days.

The first thing she did after sitting down at the computer was copy her spreadsheets. If she screwed up the copies, she’d have undamaged originals to fall back on. How much good that would do her.. she preferred not to dwell on, not right this minute, thank you very much.

“Here.” The woman who’d asked her if she’d left anything in the car plopped a pile of printouts down in front of her. “You’re supposed to plug these shipping invoices into the inventory system.”

“Oh,” Louise said: a word full of gloom if ever there was one.

“Want me to walk you through it the first time?” the woman asked. She added, “I’m Patty. If you don’t learn it from me, Nobashi- san sure as hell won’t be able to explain it to you.”

“Thanks! Would you, please?” Now Louise knew she sounded pathetically eager, but she didn’t care. Maybe there was a cork ring on this ocean of trouble after all.

“Here. What you gotta do is…” Quickly and deftly, Patty did it. When she noticed she was working on copies-Louise hadn’t even renamed them yet-she let out a wry chuckle. “You ain’t so dumb, are ya, sweetie?”

“If I’m not, what am I doing here?” Louise asked in return.

This time, Patty laughed out loud. “You see how I set up the inventory transfer?” she asked. When Louise shook her head, Patty did it again, slower this time. “Okay,” she said, rising from the chair. “Now you try it.”

With no enormous hope, Louise did. Damned if it didn’t work! Louise clapped her hands together in amazed delight. She just missed cheering out loud.

“See? It ain’t so tough,” Patty said. “Now e-mail the spreadsheet to the boss and go on to the next one.”

Before Louise could, the phone rang. Answering it was part of the job. When she did, somebody started gabbing at her in excited Japanese. “One moment, please,” she answered in English, and pressed the HOLD button. Then she fumbled her way through transferring the call to Mr. Nobashi. Patty also helped her there.

“You’re a lifesaver,” Louise exclaimed, remembering her thought of a few minutes before. “Why didn’t you get this slot?”

“ ’Cause I didn’t want it,” Patty answered calmly. “I’d sooner just crunch numbers most of the time. Nobashi pretty much leaves me alone, on account of he knows goddamn well I’m good at what I do. But you-you’re gonna have to deal with him, you poor thing, you.”

“Does he try to get his girls to go to bed with him? Is he one of those?” Louise asked. “I’ll knock his block off if he does.”

“Nah.” Patty shook her head. “He knows better’n that. Guy he took over for two, three years ago thought he could get away with that crap, like he would’ve in Japan. The gal he hit on didn’t slug him. She sued the company instead-won a pile of dough, too. So Nobashi keeps his hands to himself.”

“What’s so bad about him, then?”

Mr. Nobashi chose that minute to yell “Coffee!” from his inner sanctum. “Coffee and sweet rolls!”

Louise rapidly discovered that he ran on coffee and sweet rolls. Tea? Rice? Sashimi? Ramen, even? When sugar and caffeine weren’t enough to rock his world, he sent her down the street to pick up big boxes of drumsticks and thighs at Popeyes Chicken amp; Biscuits. So grease was definitely one of his basic food groups, too.

He also guzzled bottled water by the case. He didn’t go to the refrigerator to grab a bottle himself. God forbid! That would have been beneath a boss’ dignity. He yelled for Louise to fetch and carry instead. No matter what else she was doing, bringing his supplies was more important.

By midafternoon that first day, Louise understood exactly why Patty wanted nothing to do with the position she now occupied herself. Mr. Nobashi might not be a lech, at least on company time. A pain in the ass he definitely was.

But the ramen company paid pretty well. The woman that other exec from Japan had sexually harassed hadn’t taken them for every nickel they owned. Besides, as long as there were college students, no ramen outfit would ever go broke. Marshall sometimes seemed to live on the stuff. So had Rob, in his college days. Vanessa… From what Louise remembered, ramen was beneath Vanessa’s dignity.

As soon as it got to be half past five, Patty said, “I am so outa here. If you’ve got sense, you’ll bail, too. Otherwise, they’ll think you want to make like a salaryman and they’ll keep you here 24/7. Sometimes I think Mr. Nobashi lives in that crappy little office of his.”

Bail Louise did. A different rent-a-cop was guarding the parking lot: a burly Hispanic guy who might have been an ex-Marine. He tipped his Smokey Bear hat to her as she slid into her car.

Teo was home before her. Better yet, he’d brought back Thai takeout so she wouldn’t have to mess with ground round or chicken. “You’re so sweet!” she said. Colin would never have done anything like that. He expected to be fed. Just like Mr. Nobashi, Louise thought, a little surprised at herself.

“Hey, it’s your first day, er younger lover said, opening packages. The smells of spices and coconut filled the condo. “How did it go?”

“It’s not exciting, but I coped. One of the gals there is showing me the ropes, so that helps. The Japanese guy in charge is a real piece of work.” Louise was checking out the plastic and styrofoam package. “Oh, you got that squid salad I like!”

“I thought that was the one.” Teo made a point of keeping in mind what she liked and what she didn’t. Even though they’d been together for almost three years now, Louise still wasn’t used to that. What had she ever been to Colin but a convenience?

He was still hanging out with that geographer or geologist or whatever she was. That vaguely irked Louise, who hadn’t expected him to make anything last. After all, if she couldn’t put up with him anymore, what halfway-sane woman would be able to? Well, from what she’d heard, her ex’s squeeze was a lot younger. Odds were she didn’t have standards of comparison.

Louise did. She knew just how lucky she was. Teo’d barely had to lift a finger to sweep her off her feet.

“How was your day?” she asked him as she spooned food onto a paper plate. If she wasn’t going to worry about cooking tonight, she wasn’t going to worry about doing dishes, either.

“No sweat,” he answered. It made her laugh, the way it always did. For Teo, sweating-and making other people sweat-was making a living. It was also what made him look so good. Colin was like a brick with soft corners. She’d forgotten what a man ought to be like till she signed up for the aerobics class. She knew now, by God, and she’d never forget again.

“How many girls want your special program?” she teased. She knew she hadn’t been the first one he’d attracted. She just hoped-and kept hoping-to stay interested enough to keep ahead of the competition.

He grinned at her. He knew what she was thinking. Sometimes he sassed her about it. Always gently, though-a younger man didn’t want to set an older woman worrying. A younger man with a heart didn’t, anyhow. “Nobody you’ve got to worry about. Believe me,” he said now.

And Louise did believe him. She brought the paper plate over to the table and sat down beside him. No police scanner farted out calls. The TV wasn’t on, tuned to the news. Nothing but the two of them and dinner. Who needed more?

Sitting by Teo, she had no trouble forgetting Mr. Nobashi, either, or her anxieties about Excel. And if that wasn’t magic, what would be?