Supervolcano: Things Fall Apart

XX

Colin Ferguson looked at himself in the bathroom mirror. He whistled a few bars of the Mission: Impossible theme. “Your job, should you choose to accept it,” he said as dramatically as possible, “is to button your shirt with both hands.”

Kelly was reading on the bed. “Go for it, honey,” she called. “Tom Cruise ain’t got nothin’ on you.”

Tom Cruise had nothing on him except umpteen gazillion dollars and two good arms. Colin’s left elbow and wrist worked all right. Whenever he tried to move his left arm from the shoulder, it felt as if he’d whacked a hornets’ nest in there with a stick. The physical therapist insisted that time and practice would make it easier, if not necessarily easy. The puckered scar from the 7.62mm AK round and the surgeons’ knife marks (some smaller ones newer and pinker than the rest—they’d gone in again, arthroscopically, to clean out more bone fragments) insisted that the therapist didn’t know what she was talking about.

Well, he had to try. He did. “Ffffudge!” he said—not quite a slip in front of Kelly, but mighty close.

“You want help?” she asked.

“No. What I want is to be able to do this by myself,” Colin answered. “I want it not to hurt so darn much when I do it, too. I can almost manage the first part. The other half isn’t there yet, though. Not even close.”

“I’m sorry. You got torn up, from what the doctors say,” Kelly told him.

“Yeah, I know.” He was still trying to decide whether buttoning down from the top hurt more than buttoning up from the bottom. He hadn’t made up his mind. Where he was right now, both seemed equally horrendous. He’d started getting good at doing buttons with just his right hand. Going back to normal felt like more trouble than it was worth. He kept at it anyhow. At last, he said, “There! I did it. And I didn’t age a day over five years.”

“Want a pain pill?” Kelly asked. “You’ve still got some left.”

He did want one. He shook his head all the same. “Thanks, but no thanks. I’m trying to do without ’em as much as I can, so I don’t get to like ’em too well.”

“Okay, but they’re there for when you really hurt. You’re making noises like you really hurt,” Kelly said. “You’re also making noises like a cop who’s scared to death of drugs.”

“Well, if I am, I’ve earned the right,” Colin retorted. “I don’t know how many people I’ve seen who messed up their lives ’cause they found out how much they liked getting loaded.”

“I can’t see you knocking over a pharmacy next week,” Kelly said.

“No, and I want to make sure you can’t see me doing anything like that,” Colin said. “Anyway, it’s kind of eased off now that it’s just hanging again.”

“Okay.” By the way she said it, it was anything but. She didn’t push it any further than that, though. One of the things wives—and husbands—needed to learn was when to back off.

Putting on jeans wasn’t such an ordeal—his left arm didn’t need to do as much. “I’m only glad I’m not a southpaw, and that the punk didn’t get me in the other shoulder,” he said. “Then I really would’ve been wrecked.”

“I’m not glad about any of it, not even a little bit,” Kelly declared.

“Well, neither am I,” Colin said. The more he tried to make his wounded arm work, the more he wondered if he’d ever be able to go back to the cop shop. He could do the part of the job that involved sitting at a desk. In the field, though, he’d be a liability—hell, a danger—to himself and to whoever was with him.

For that matter, he’d be a danger going to and from the station. You could ride a bike with one good arm as long as nothing went wrong. The second anything did, you were screwed. The same held true in a car, even one with automatic. You couldn’t even think about it if you had a stick.

He carefully went down the stairs. He could use the banister climbing them. It was on his bad side descending. If he slipped, he’d either fall or try to catch himself with his left arm and then fall. Stairs were dangerous. They got more dangerous when a cat fell asleep on them.

“Move your fuzzy butt,” Colin told Playboy. Playboy ignored him. Colin stepped around the cat. One of these days, he wouldn’t see the lazy beast. Then they’d both be sorry.

He ran water into a Pyrex measuring cup to nuke it to make coffee. As long as they had electricity, he’d enjoy it. When he finished his joe, Kelly fixed some. He went into the front room and turned on the TV. He’d developed a new tolerance for it since he got hurt. Watching cost no effort, and he could work the remote with one hand.

Which he did, as soon as the picture came on: it was Barney and Baby Bop. PBS was fine most of the time, but not all the time. He switched to CNN. A Viagra commercial was running. He muted it. It was at least as irksome as the sappy purple dinosaur. A commercial for backyard chicken coops followed it. He wouldn’t have seen that before the eruption. But meat and eggs, these days, were more do-it-yourself than they had been for many years.

“Hey, hon!” he called.

“What?” Kelly answered from the kitchen. The microwave hadn’t dinged again yet.

“If I do retire, what do you say I start raising chickens? We could use the poop to fertilize the garden.”

“If that’s what you want to do,” she said. “Make sure it is before you start, that’s all.” He nodded, though she couldn’t see him. It sounded like good advice. So did most of what she said.

At last, a newswoman came on. “A bill to construct seven new nuclear plants has passed the House,” she said. “Fierce debate is expected in the Senate. Polls show that most Americans want more energy, no matter how it is produced. But less than one person in four wants a nuclear power plant built within a hundred miles of his or her home.”

Colin sipped his coffee. “Everybody wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die,” he said.

“Say what?” Kelly brought in her cup. She hadn’t heard the story. He explained. She nodded. “Oh. Yeah. One of the things I haven’t heard many people say is that the supervolcano coughed out a lot of radioactive crud. Not by percentage, of course, but when over six hundred cubic miles of junk come out, even a tiny percentage makes a fair-sized raw number.”

“If the EPA finds out about that, I bet they declare the eruption illegal,” Colin said. “Then all our troubles are over, right?”

“Right.” She sent him a severe look. He grinned back.

On the TV, the newswoman said, “The Administration hopes the disastrous outages in the Northeast last winter will allow this bill to pass both houses at last. The nuclear plants will add to the grid a large part of the power lost as a result of the freezeup in Quebec. Environmental groups vow to fight construction through the courts if the bill does pass.”

“So they’ll start building them about the time the climate finally gets better on its own,” Colin said.

“That may not be for hundreds of years,” Kelly reminded him.

“And your point is… ?” he said. She stuck out her tongue at him.

CNN ran more commercials. When the news came back, it was with a report from London. The reporter stood outside in the snow, bundled up as if near the summit of Everest. It wasn’t winter yet—it wasn’t far into fall—but he looked cold anyway. “The continued fading of the Gulf Stream from stream to trickle has dealt Britain and all of northwestern Europe a catastrophic blow,” he said somberly. “The United Kingdom has endured winters of discontent every year since the eruption. And they have grown progressively worse. As has often been remarked, we are on the latitude of Labrador. More and more, we have a climate to match.”

They cut to clogged roads in London, to fields full of drifts, to Stonehenge all ghostly under a mantle of white. Then back to the fields, to cattle trying to dig their way through the thick snow to whatever greenery lay beneath.

“Our livestock is not so drastically afflicted as that in the United States,” the reporter acknowledged. “Yet forage for our cattle and sheep has decreased as the climate worsens. Last year, the Home Counties—for our American friends, the ones surrounding London—had a winter that once would have been reckoned harsh even in the Scottish Highlands. Forecasts for the long cold season ahead are even grimmer.”

Another cut, this time to a poorly shaved farmer in Wellingtons and a thick anorak with the hood over his head. “It’s a balls-up, all right,” he said, his accent much less suave than the BBC man’s. “I’ve got to buy more fodder from abroad, because my flocks can’t get as much from the fields when they’re mostly frozen. And sweet suffering Jaysus, the prices! I’ll have to charge more for my animals when I sell ’em. Everyone will. It’s a pity. It’s a great pity, but no help for it I can see. My main hope is, I can get through the winter without losing half the beasts from a blizzard.”

A 3-D graph showed three steeply rising lines. “These are the prices of petroleum, wheat, and beef since the eruption,” the reported said, in case his audience couldn’t read the dates at the bottom of the screen and the words PETROLEUM, WHEAT, and BEEF. “No end to this inflation seems to be in sight. Production has dropped sharply in all three commodities, whilst demand has remained constant or even increased. A more classic recipe for exploding prices can scarcely be imagined.”

This time, the picture cut away to the bustling port of London. A correspondent standing on a wharf said, “There is concern the Thames may freeze for an extended period this winter. If it should, one of the busiest ports in the world will have to shut down. Two new icebreakers have entered service since the supervolcano erupted, and five more are on order. If the port does fail, the effect on the UK’s economy will be staggering.”

They shifted to a different reporter, this one on a beach under as bright a sun as the world got these days. People in Speedos and bikinis invited skin cancer. The beach was in… Greece, by the unreadable letters on a taverna. “More and more inhabitants of Britain and Ireland and Scandinavia are abandoning their homelands for the more congenial climes farther south,” the reporter said. “Immigration within the European Union is easy—so easy that Greece and Italy and Spain have begun to worry that they may be swamped by newcomers. Some politicians in these Mediterranean countries have proposed stricter controls and higher taxes for aliens coming to their warmer shores. That the EU constitution forbids such discrimination fazes them not in the least.”

“I know the weather is bad farther north,” a Greek official with a bushy mustache said in excellent English. “But this is our country, our homeland. We were here first. We have more than anyone else the right to live here now. We will not let foreigners buy our nation out from under us.”

Colin turned to Kelly. “Change his clothes and his accent a little and he could be from Orange County.”

“He has the same troubles we do, and for the same reason: his weather’s got worse, but it isn’t terrible,” she answered. “And his supplies don’t move along I-10 to get to his country, either. Compared to us, he’s well off.”

“And compared to England, he’s in hog heaven,” Colin said. “The Russian war in the Ukraine seems to have bogged down pretty well, too. Ain’t everybody got fun?” He stood up to fix himself some more coffee. By now, he was good at doing that one-handed.

Rob had eaten a good many strange things before he wound up in Guilford. That was what he got for liking weird restaurants. He’d had sea cucumbers at a Chinese place in San Diego. The taste was briny and innocuous, but the texture put him in mind of something halfway between custard and Play-Doh. He’d eaten a stewed sheep’s eyeball and other odd bits of the head at a Moroccan restaurant in… was it Tucson or Phoenix? He couldn’t remember. He liked tongue, but for anyone who grew up with Jewish friends that hardly counted as strange.

But he was absolutely, positively sure he’d never eaten chitlins before he got here. Maybe if he’d grown up with friends from South Central L.A… . Since he hadn’t, pig guts had flown under his radar till now.

He and Lindsey ate them for the same reason slaves in the antebellum South and their sharecropper descendants had: they couldn’t afford to waste anything. When she made chicken soup, she threw in the feet these days along with the rest. They thickened the stock a little, and you could get bits of meat and skin off them if you worked at it.

But chicken feet were a difference of degree. Chitlins were a difference of kind. Somebody in Guilford had a cookbook that told you what to do with them, even if it called them chitterlings. That was necessary at first because, unlike in the deep South, they weren’t a part of local pre-eruption cuisine. These days, you didn’t throw out anything you could possibly use.

Since Rob spent more time at home than Lindsey did, he got to deal with them. You turned the guts inside out. You scraped them. You soaked them in cold, salted water for a day. You washed them half a dozen times. Considering what had been going through them, that struck Rob as an excellent plan. Then you cut them into two-inch lengths, stewed them with onions and whatever other herbs you could grab, and ate them. The first time Rob and Lindsey tried them, they were surprised at how tasty they were.

You could also deep-fry them. You could if you had cooking fat to spare, anyhow. Even though Rob and Lindsey had got some lard along with the chitlins, they didn’t. Fat was hard to come by, and you used it with care. Lard, schmaltz, duck fat, goose grease… They were luxuries, delicacies. He couldn’t recall the last time he’d eaten butter. Olive oil? Olive oil was right out.

Chitlins and parsnips. Pig’s feet and potatoes. Duck and barley stew. Sauerkraut. Homebrew beer. Moonshine. Baked potatoes with salt and a little schmaltz for flavoring. Rye bread that was all rye, not the domesticated stuff groceries called rye bread. Moose meat. Wild turkey—a much skinnier, stringier bird than its domestic cousins. Berries. Mushrooms.

All of it added up to just about enough to live. Even Jim Farrell had had to have his trademark suits taken in. “I resent being skinny,” he said on a sleigh-borne swing through Guilford. “But I suppose I would resent being dead even more.”

“Seems a pretty good bet,” Rob said. They were sitting in the parlor of the Trebor Mansion Inn, enjoying the warmth of the fire blazing in the fireplace. With malice aforethought, he added, “You probably wouldn’t be so noisy about it, though.”

Farrell aimed a baleful glare not at Rob but at Dick Barber. “See the trouble you got us all into when you tossed a bone to these stray polliwogs or whatever they were?”

“Well, if I hadn’t they would have caused trouble somewhere else,” Barber answered. “It might as well be here in Guilford, where they can entertain us while they do it.”

A Maine Coon kitten started to climb Rob’s leg. He knew how kittens climbed legs: the same way they climbed trees, with their claws all the way out. Maybe trees didn’t mind. His leg did. He gently removed the kitten before it made too many flesh wounds and set it on the couch beside him. It let out an indignant, squeaky mew.

“Take it easy, you dumb thing,” Rob told it. “I was just trying to keep you from shredding me. And now you’re up here.”

“He talks to cats,” Dick Barber said to Farrell. “I’ve seen it before.”

“When he gets them to answer, that’s when we have to worry,” Farrell replied.

“Well, I’ll talk to you, too,” Rob said to the retired history prof. Farrell touched the brim of his fedora—as regal a gesture as Maine north and west of the Interstate was likely to put up with. Rob went on, “Are we going to make it through another winter? Not one whole heck of a lot got up here this summer.”

“Which is an understatement. I was keeping track, so I have unfortunate reason to know.” Farrell sighed, muttered to himself, and then went on, “Most of us should make it. Guilford should do all right. But the closer you get to Canada, the less came up from the south.”

“Not so many people up there. More moose to shoot. More pines to cut down,” Barber observed.

“I like to think there’s more to life than cracking moose bones for marrow in front of the fire pit,” Farrell said. “Neanderthal Man could have done that. Neanderthal Man did do that, as a matter of fact. How have we advanced over the past fifty thousand years?”

“If we’ve got a satellite phone with a charged battery, we can take a picture of ourselves cracking moose bones for marrow and post it on our Facebook page,” Rob answered.

“Well, yes, certainly,” Farrell said. “But how have we advanced?”

“We’ve lost some more people this year,” Dick Barber said. “They decide they want their cell phones and their Facebook pages, and they leave for places that still have them. Or they just get sick of shoveling snow and chopping firewood.”

“The really interesting question is whether it’s that much better anywhere else in the United States.” Farrell waved objections aside before they got raised, like a man swatting at gnats that hadn’t landed on him yet. “Oh, I’m not talking about places like Florida and Southern California. Those were barely part of the country even before the eruption.”

“Thanks a bunch,” Rob muttered.

“Any time,” Farrell said. “But from things I hear, you will endure shortages and outages and dreadful weather if you move to Ohio or Tennessee or any of those other heathen places. And the people already infesting California or Florida want no more company for their fortunate selves. Hawaii, now, Hawaii is doing everything but sowing mines in the Pacific to discourage new arrivals. If only it could come within light-years of feeding itself, it might try to regain its aboriginal independence.”

Rob looked at him in admiration. “I don’t think I ever heard anybody use ‘aboriginal’ in a sentence before.”

“Your servant,” Jim Farrell said modestly. “Ambrose Bierce defined aborigines as ‘Persons of little worth found cumbering the soil of a newly discovered country. They—’”

“‘—soon cease to cumber; they fertilize,’” Rob finished for him. “Sorry, Professor. But I found The Devil’s Dictionary when I was, like, fifteen. My dad had it. It’s warped me ever since.”

“Your father is a man of parts,” Farrell said. “Did I hear that not all his parts are working the way they ought to? A robber with an assault rifle?”

“That’s right.” Rob nodded. “Last letter I got, he still didn’t know if he’d be able to go back to the force.”

“Chances are he’s made up his mind by now, then,” Dick Barber said. “Our connections to the regular U.S. Post Awful aren’t what you’d call great.”

“I know. We’re lucky to have any at all, when we’re pretty much off the grid and off the map as far as they’re concerned,” Rob said.

“It’s partly because the postmasters in Newport and Bangor remember we’re here even if Heap Big Chief Postmaster in Washington doesn’t want to. And it’s partly because Jim”—Barber pointed at Professor Farrell—“threatened to talk to Canada Post if the USA stopped sending things up this way.”

“I did not threaten. I merely stated an intention,” Farrell said. “Hard to believe as it may seem, someone at the Postal Service is still possessed of a vestigial sense of shame—and we are still possessed of a vestigial link to the rest of the land of the corporate and the home of the resigned.”

Rob grinned. “Even if that doesn’t scan real well, I may steal it.”

“You can’t steal what’s freely given,” Jim Farrell replied.

He was fun to listen to, more fun than anyone else in Guilford—probably more fun than anyone else in his little not-quite-duchy. When power outages made entertainment at the flip of a switch only a nostalgic memory, that counted for a hell of a lot. Farrell’s sentences had grammar. They had wit. They had just enough purple passages to make listeners smile… and to camouflage his underlying hard common sense.

“Thanks, Professor,” Rob said, and then, not quite apropos of nothing, “I like it here!”

“You must. Otherwise, you would have bailed out as soon as the runways at Bangor or Portland thawed out enough to let planes land and take off,” Dick Barber said. “You. Y’all. Youse guys. You and Biff and Justin and Charlie. All of you.”

“I understood you,” Rob said. “We’ll always be outsiders—”

“Like me,” Barber broke in.

“Yeah, like you.” Rob nodded. “But it’s okay. The people whose people have lived here since Maine was part of Massachusetts, like Bill Gagne in Greenville, they let you talk at meetings and everything.”

“Then they call him an idiot,” Jim Farrell put in.

“Hey, I didn’t know Maine was part of Massachusetts once before I got here,” Rob said.

“Well, I am an idiot sometimes. Sometimes I’m not, too, though, and they see that.” Barber eyed Rob. “Sometimes even you’re not.”

“Maybe sometimes,” Rob allowed. Another kitten wanted to climb him. He picked it up, put it on his lap, and started petting it. He’d never dreamt Guilford, Maine, would end up his favorite spot in the whole wide world, but there you were. And here he was.

Marshall took another sheet out of the typewriter and eyed it. The ribbon was starting to go. The next time he had power, he needed to order a new one online. Editors had eased up on typewritten submissions. That started to happen pretty soon after the eruption, but gathered steam after the big outages in the Northeast. They did insist on black copy, though, for best results when they scanned to OCR.

I can get a few more pages out of this one, anyhow, Marshall thought. He fed a fresh sheet of paper into the old portable. By now, he’d got used to it. It wasn’t user-friendly, not the way a computer was. He had to think things through before he set words to paper. Sometimes he fiddled around in longhand till he got his sentences the way he wanted, and then transcribed them. But he could use the typewriter to do what he needed.

Tap, tap, tappety-tap. He had the touch down now. And he was getting close to twenty thousand words into what might turn out to be a novel. If it did, when it did, he intended to dedicate it to Kelly. How many stepmoms got a novel dedicated to them? She was a character in the book, too, renamed and (he hoped) suitably disguised.

After he took out the next page, he looked at his watch. Like a lot of people his age, he’d started wearing one when his phone wouldn’t reliably give him the time. “Shit!” he said. It was later than he’d thought.

He filled a pot with water. A match got a burner on the stove going. He cut up potatoes, carrots, and onions, and then a chunk of pork shoulder. They all went into the pot, along with salt, pepper, some other spices, and a bay leaf. The pot went onto the stove. He put the lid on it. In a couple of hours, it would be pork stew.

Pork. Chicken. Chicken. Pork. Fish (or sometimes squid). Pork. Chicken. Chicken. Pork. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d eaten beef. McDonald’s and Burger King sold so many pork patties these days, they’d had Muslims and Orthodox Jews picket them. Lamb? Marshall sighed. Lamb had been too goddamn expensive since long before the eruption.

Back to the typewriter. The real world receded in favor of the world inside his head. He looked up in surprise when Janine’s key chunked in the lock. He also looked up in surprise because it was getting dark. He could still see the words he was putting on paper. Past that, he hadn’t cared about anything. He was lucky he’d remembered to get the stew going.

He stood up and kissed Janine. “Hey, babe,” he said, sounding more like his father than he knew. “How’d it go?”

“I looked stuff up,” she answered. “I filled out some forms that don’t need lawyers. I interviewed a little old lady who may have been allergic to an antibiotic her doctor prescribed for her. She’s trying to decide whether to sue him. The firm is trying to decide whether to take the case if she does. Another exciting day in the life of a paralegal.”

“Right,” he said, and lit a kerosene lantern. All over L.A., people were doing the same thing. If the Big One chose this moment to hit, a million lanterns would fall over and a million fires would start. It would be like San Francisco in 1906, only more spread out.

“Stew smells good,” she said, sniffing. She sounded as if she deserved part credit, and she did: it was her recipe. After the sniff, she asked, “What else did you do?”

“Couple thousand words,” he said, not without pride. “It’s starting to feel like it’s going somewhere.” He’d approached it with… fear was the right word. He wasn’t some teenager, who might plunge into a novel and finish because he didn’t know how hard it was. He knew, all right. Maybe he knew too well.

“Okay.” Janine didn’t read a lot for fun. She read more now than she had before the supervolcano blew. Everybody did, because less in the way of other kinds of entertainment was around. But she still didn’t read all that much, not like Marshall. She went on, “When are you gonna see if you can sell it?”

“Two or three more chapters,” he answered. “I should have enough then to see if I can get an agent interested.”

She started to say something, then let it go. She looked under the lid on the pot instead. She stirred with a serving spoon. “It’s coming along,” she said. “Do we have any wine in the icebox?”

Another old word reviving with the thing so many refrigerators had turned back into. Rob pulled out a bottle of Chablis. He poured for both of them. He’d done his duty on the work front. A little buzz would be nice. The wine would go with the stew, too.

He wouldn’t crack Iron Chef any time soon, but dinner turned out fine. They killed the bottle of wine. Marshall wondered if Janine was drinking herself into the mood. Kerosene lanterns made lousy reading lamps. The most fun you could have with the power off, you made in pairs. It was also the most fun you could have with the power on, but it had less competition now.

But that turned out not to be why Janine was nerving herself. Instead of doing dishes, she said, “Marshall, this isn’t working out. You’re not bringing in enough money to make us go, and all you do is sit and pound that typewriter. You don’t have enough ambition.”

“What? Being a writer isn’t an ambition?” he said, because he knew too well he had no comeback for the other.

“Not when it doesn’t make you anything, and it doesn’t,” she answered. “And I was hoping for more, well, excitement when I told Paul to hit the road. Coming home to somebody who hardly even notices I was gone doesn’t cut it.”

“So what do you want me to do? Pack up and leave?” he asked, hoping against hope she’d tell him no.

But she nodded briskly. “Yes, that’s about it. Oh, you don’t have to clear out of here by tomorrow morning or anything. I know it’s not simple without a working car. It isn’t like you don’t have anywhere to go, though.”

Back to the old house—again, he thought unhappily. “And how long till somebody else moves in here?” he asked. He was just being snarky—if she was out looking for that somebody else, he had no clue about it.

Or he hadn’t had a clue about it till her jaw dropped. Even by lantern light, he thought she turned red, but it might have been his imagination. The other damn well wasn’t. “That’s got nothing to do with anything,” she said, her voice a little shrill.

It had a lot to do with everything, as he knew perfectly well. Anybody who’ll cheat with you will cheat on you, too. Marshall heard his father’s words in his memory. Not for the first time, Dad knew what he was talking about, dammit. “Okay,” Marshall said, even if it wasn’t. “I’ll leave as soon as I can pack up my shit and get a car. It was fun while it lasted, wasn’t it?”

“Some of it.” Janine’s mouth twisted. She was gonna be like his sister. She’d erase the good times, so all the bad stuff would be his fault. That sucked, but what could you do? Except move out, anyway?

Kelly grunted when she lifted a box out of the Taurus’ trunk. “What did you put in here?” she asked. “Anvils?”

“That one’s got manuscripts and shit like that in it,” Marshall answered. “A sheet of paper doesn’t weigh anything much, but a box of paper’s heavier than a box of lead. If I did sci-fi, I’d figure out some bullshit reason why.”

“I always thought the same thing. Nice to know I’m not the only one.” Kelly lugged the box to the open front door. Playboy was shut in the laundry room to keep him from getting loose (not punishment—he’d been bribed inside with treats). Deborah, however, remained underfoot. “Get out of the way!” Kelly told her, not for the first time.

“C’mere, kiddo. I’ll read you a story,” Colin called from the front room. Deborah went, but she’d gone before, too. With his bad arm, Colin wasn’t helping Marshall move back in. Not to put too fine a point on it, Kelly’d told him she would break his good arm if he tried carrying stuff.

I’m getting too old for this myself, she thought as she hauled the box up the stairs. She did give Colin a certain amount of credit. He hadn’t gone even slightly I-told-you-so on Marshall. He’d just told him to come back and made sympathetic noises that sounded as if he meant them. Maybe he realized Marshall was beating himself up, and he didn’t have to do it for his son.

Marshall came upstairs right behind Kelly. His mouth wore a sour smile. “Gee, I wonder which way to turn from here,” he said. “I mean, I’ve never set eyes on this hallway before, right?”

“Don’t worry about it,” Kelly said. “You’ve got a roof over your head, and plenty of people don’t.”

“Yeah, yeah.” His nod was sour, too. “I don’t mind being my dad’s son. I’m kinda proud of it, to tell you the truth. But being my dad’s kid… That gets old, you know?”

She did know, or thought she did. If Professor Rheinburg hadn’t pulled strings or twisted arms or whatever he did at Cal State Dominguez, she would be scuffling herself.

“Times are hard,” she said. “What can you do? When your novel sells, things’ll start straightening out.”

“Glad you think so. Janine didn’t feel like waiting.”

“Well…” What was she supposed to say to that? She tried, “When you hooked up with her, you weren’t exactly thinking with the top part of your head, were you?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he answered, deadpan, as Colin might have. Then he did something Colin wouldn’t have in a million years: he grabbed his crotch. Kelly laughed so hard, she almost fell over.

“What’s funny?” Her husband’s voice floated up from below.

“Tell you later,” she said. And she did, after Marshall’s stuff was all in, Playboy was released (his irate meow said that, bribe or no bribe, they had no business living without a cat for so long), and Deborah went off to color or look at a picture book or play with dolls and dinosaurs or whatever else she felt like doing.

Colin chuckled. “He’s got it figured out, too, then. That’s good. If he could’ve seen it sooner—”

“He wouldn’t’ve got laid so much once he moved in with her,” Kelly interrupted.

“Yeah, there is that,” Colin said. “But that doesn’t guarantee a happy ending, not unless you’re from Hollywood and you get to roll the credits before they start arguing about who didn’t clean up after the party and whose turn it is to take out the trash.”

“So what does guarantee a happy ending, O Sage of the Age?” Kelly asked, perhaps less sarcastically than she’d intended.

Colin reached up with his good hand. “Sorry—have to adjust my turban so the reception’s better,” he explained. Kelly rolled her eyes. He went on, “Dumb luck has a lot to do with it: finding the right person. Putting up with the annoying stuff the other person does, even if she—he—whatever—is the right one. Knowing that she—he—is gonna put up with your crap the same way. Making up your mind you’re gonna ride it out no matter where it goes. Oh, and being happy in the sack with the other person every once in a while sure doesn’t hurt, either.”

Kelly considered. “Sounds good to me. Doctor Phil can get off the TV now. Look out for Doctor Colin.”

“Look out, is right,” he said. “So how are we doing?”

She spread the fingers on her left hand. The diamonds in her wedding ring weren’t humongous, but they were sparkly. “I like it fine so far. Why don’t you ask me again in about thirty years?”

“Okay,” he said, and then, in a low voice, “Think Marshall’ll be out of the house yet?”

“As a matter of fact, yes,” Kelly answered. She saw she’d surprised him, but she meant it.