Supervolcano: Things Fall Apart

VI

As twilight deepened toward dark on Halloween, Guilford, Maine, reminded Rob Ferguson of a scene out of a Currier and Ives print. Snow dappled the few pines that hadn’t been cut down for fuel. People on skis and snowshoes tramped the streets. Okay, they wore jeans and anoraks and watch caps, not nineteenth-century fancy dress, but you couldn’t have everything.

A sleigh came by, drawn by two well-groomed black horses. In it rode Jim Farrell. His fancy dress—fedora and elegantly tailored wool topcoat over a suit with sharp lapels—was more Happy Days Are Here Again than Currier and Ives, but no denying he had style. Even 1930s finery made jeans and anoraks and watch caps mighty dowdy by comparison.

Not that Rob cared. Jeans and anoraks and watch caps weren’t high style, but they were his style. The only reason for dressing up he’d ever found was trolling for pretty girls. Now that he’d actually landed one, he didn’t need to worry about that nonsense any more. Lindsey wasn’t of the let’s-put-on-the-dog-to-impress-people school, either. If she were, Rob wasn’t sure he would have wanted to marry her.

Plastic jack-o’-lanterns and black cats weren’t quite from the nineteenth-century version of Halloween, either, but they did add splashes of color to the white landscape. The splashes were a little duller than they had been the year before, or the year before that—the plastic junk came from the days when the supervolcano hadn’t erupted yet, and it was fading and cracking and otherwise showing its age.

Rob let out a mournful, fog-filled breath. Winter had Guilford firmly in its grip again. There’d been snow flurries every week or two all the way through the alleged summer. Even the quickest-growing strains of rye and oats had trouble ripening in this tiny growing season.

A few real jack-o’-lanterns went with the plastic ones. If you were both lucky and careful here, you could raise pumpkins and other northern squashes in a greenhouse. Some enterprising farmers and town gardeners had. People still enjoyed pumpkin pies—enjoyed them more than ever, because they were a surviving luxury where so many had perished. And the rinds (except for the ones grinning with candles inside them) and the vines would feed the local pigs. Less got wasted now than it had in the days when Guilford was connected to the outside world the year around.

Rob went back to the apartment he shared with Lindsey. A wood-fired stove vented to the outside had replaced the useless electric range long before he married her. Not only was it far more practical these days, it also helped heat the place. A delicious smell wafted out when he opened the door. Lindsey was using some hoarded nutmeg and cinnamon on a pumpkin pie. Rob didn’t know what she’d swapped for the pumpkin flesh. None of the furniture seemed to be missing, so he wouldn’t worry about it.

On an end table by the door stood a bowl of oat-flour cookies sweetened with maple syrup. Before the eruption, they would have been organic, gluten-free, super-expensive delights from Whole Foods or Trader Joe’s. Now they were just what Lindsey’d made to give to trick-or-treaters. The kids old enough to remember packaged chocolate bars would rather have had those. Rob fiercely missed chocolate himself. Well, you did what you could with what you had, that was all.

He filched a cookie. “Good stuff, hon,” he called to his wife, who stayed in the kitchen to tend to the pot-bellied stove. It was a lot more fickle than the old electric, but it had the advantage of still working.

She made an exasperated noise, not at the stove but at him. “Try to leave a few, please,” she said. “They’ll start knocking on the door any minute now.”

“You know me too well,” Rob said.

“Much too well,” Lindsey agreed cheerfully.

Before he could crank his dudgeon up to high, they did start knocking—pounding—on the door. In case he had any doubts, they also yelled “Trick or treat!” in a chorus of earsplitting trebles.

He opened up. The costumes were homemade, and warm. One kid was dressed as a polar bear, another as an Eskimo. Rob hadn’t known there were any blue-eyed, freckled Eskimos, but who was he to criticize? He handed out cookies. “Thank you!” the boys piped. Gone—at least in these parts—were the days when mothers rejected any treats that weren’t factory-wrapped.

Lindsey brought him a bowl of stew reheated from the day before and the day before that. By now, the pork was meltingly tender and all the chunks of root vegetables had kind of mooshed together. “Yum!” he said, and made everything in there disappear.

The libation that went with the stew was homemade whiskey turned out by a distiller in Dover-Foxcroft. It wouldn’t knock single-malt scotch off the shelves any time soon. But it was here, while single-malts were only a memory. “Let’s hear it for moonshine!” Rob said.

“I don’t think he needs to worry about revenuers smashing up his still,” Lindsey answered. Since Rob didn’t, either, he let that go. Lindsey continued, “Want some pie?”

“Wow! She’s sexy and she cooks!” Rob exclaimed. She not only cooked, she gave him a dirty look—and some pumpkin pie, still warm and a little gloopy. He sounded as appreciative as he could with his mouth full. He must have done a good enough job, because after a while she went from glowering to giggling.

They expended almost all the oat-and-maple cookies by the time the trick-or-treaters stopped coming to the door. Then Rob got into his own costume: a tweed jacket, a shirt with a button-down collar, and a tie he’d got for an hour of guitar lessons. Since he never wore clothes like that of his own accord, they had to be a Halloween getup. Lindsey dressed in white from hat to shoes, and put white face paint on all her skin that showed: she was going as a snowdrift.

“Hottest snowdrift around,” Rob said, which won him another dirty look. He grabbed his guitar. Lindsey carried a torch—an electric one with LEDs—to light their way to the Trebor Mansion Inn.

From somewhere, Dick Barber had got a big box of tiny Hershey bars. “Magic,” he said smugly when Rob asked him how he’d pulled that off. For all Rob knew, he meant it. The taste of one brought tears to his eyes, so vividly did it evoke the bygone days before the eruption. You can’t go home again. Someone had written a book by that name. Whoever he was, he’d known too well what he was talking about.

Lubricated by more moonshine and homebrew beer, Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles played for a while. They still gigged every now and then, here and there in this cut-off part of Maine. But the years when Rob and Justin and Charlie and Biff had lived in one another’s pockets seemed almost as far from the here-and-now as the taste of a Hershey bar. And the music just didn’t feel the same when it was all acoustic.

Again, you did what you could do. Or, if you decided you just had to have chocolate and electricity and the other marvels of what had been Western civilization, you got the hell out of Guilford and headed for a warmer clime. Rob had thought about it now and again, especially during summer snowstorms. But Lindsey didn’t want to leave. And, by now, he had more roots here than he did anywhere else. He wondered how his folks and his brother and sister were doing, but he hadn’t seen any of them since before the supervolcano blew, and he hadn’t talked much with them since, either.

When he mentioned that to Jim Farrell, the retired history prof said, “If things matter to you, you’ll do better somewhere else. If people matter to you, this is the place to stay. I could be watching TV in Florida, but I’m having more fun here.”

“Hey, here you get to be on television, even if you don’t get to watch it,” Rob said. “That CNN crew that came in by dogsled last winter, to interview the Führer of Maine north and west of the Interstate…”

“No fair, Rob,” Dick Barber said, wagging an indignant finger at him. The lord and master of the Trebor Mansion Inn went on, “That segment never aired. The CNN newsie was a lot cuter than Jim—”

“I resemble that remark,” Farrell broke in.

“A lot cuter than Jim,” Barber repeated, unfazed, “but she wasn’t too dumb to see how dumb he was making her look. And in case she had been, her director and the camera guy saw it, too.”

“It wasn’t a beauty contest, or I would have been in over my imperfectly lovely head,” Farrell said. He wasn’t half bad—except for a certain glint in his eye, distinguished would have suited him as well as his outfit—but a broadcasting anchorwoman did have some unfair advantages. Chuckling, Farrell continued, “No, fool that she was, she wanted to talk with me. This sorry world has a great many things in it that I do poorly or not at all, but by God, gentlemen, I can run my mouth.”

“It’s why we love you so,” Barber said. Farrell tipped his fedora: as much a trademark with him as it had been with Fiorello La Guardia a lifetime earlier. His silver hair shone, even in the relatively dim light of the fireplace and tallow candles.

Rob grinned. “Nobody talks this way down where things are still within shouting distance of what they used to be.”

“Of course not. Nobody down there needs to,” Farrell said. “Down there, they can still call a million songs and a thousand talk-show hosts—to say nothing of hot and cold running porn, which is all that should be said of it—out of the air whenever it strikes their fancy. They don’t need to talk.” His rich baritone freighted the word with scorn. “Here, now, this is a land where we have to make our own fun. And so we do.”

“Speaking of fun, how about another song from you sociable Darwinists?” Barber said.

Thus provoked, Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles launched into “Justinian II,” an underappreciated ditty about an equally unappreciated Byzantine Emperor:

“Justinian the Second lost his nose,

Lost his nose, lost his nose.

Justinian II lost his nose—

The Emperor of Byzantium!

They’d loved his father and his grandfather, too.

His great-granddad would more than do.

But he made them hate him strong and true

As Emperor of Byzantium.

So they overthrew him with effortless ease,

Cut off his nose before he could sneeze,

And exiled him to the Chersonese—

Ex-Emperor of Byzantium!

Folks say Jesus is coming, and is He pissed,

But Justinian, he was hardly missed

Until he decided to resist

The new Emperor of Byzantium.

A storm blew up on the high seas.

His friends, they got down on their knees

And said, ‘Justinian, kindly, if you please

Forget about Byzantium!’

‘If I forget, may God drown me now!’

And the storm just stopped—I don’t know how.

And somehow on that wallowing scow

He made it to Byzantium.

He got his throne back with great vim,

Killed the guy who got rid of him

And the one who overthrew him

As Emperor of Byzantium.

Not all stories have happy ends.

He murdered so many, he lost all his friends.

So people turned on him again…

Friendless in Byzantium.

The moral’s simple—keep an eye on your nose.

When you deal with people, watch how it goes

Or you’ll end up like Justinian Number Dos:

A dead man in Byzantium.”

When they finished, Lindsey turned to Rob and said, “You guys are weird, you know?”

“I had heard rumors,” Rob admitted. Justin, by contrast, took a bow. Rob went on, “You need to remember, though—you married me anyway.”

“Oh, yeah.” Lindsey spread her fingers and looked at her ring, as if to remind herself. She went on, “You probably drugged me. Rock-’n’-roll guys are notorious for that, right?”

“At least,” Rob said, and then, “I wish! The last time I had any fun drugs here—well, except for booze—it was the Vicodin the clinic doc gave me when I got shot in the leg. Some things cost more than they’re worth, if you know what I mean.”

“What else could it have been, though?” Lindsey said. “Love?”

“Crazy idea, all right,” Rob agreed. They grinned at each other.

Louise Ferguson often wondered how the hell the Van Slyke Pharmacy stayed in business. For one thing, it was a mom-and-pop up against the chains. Mom-and-pop hamburger stands went belly-up in short order when they butted heads with the Golden Arches and Burger King. They might make better burgers, but they took longer and cost more, and the people who didn’t live in the neighborhood wouldn’t know the burgers were better. Most of the time, being sure what you’d get trumped quality.

The Van Slyke Pharmacy certainly charged more than chains like Rite-Aid and Walgreens, both for prescriptions and for over-the-counter meds. The only people who came in for the stuffed animals and the gaudy ceramic horrors were obvious escapees from the local Home for the Terminally Taste-Impaired. Yes, the place also sold those secondhand books. But no one in the history of the world had ever got rich selling secondhand books. Even Utnapishtim had to declare bankruptcy after his Gently Used Cuneiform Tablets shop failed back in Sumerian days.

Then there was her boss. Jared Watt might be nicer than Mr. Nobashi, but he was also stranger. Considering how squirrely the salaryman from Hiroshima had been, that really took some doing. He not only managed, he passed with flying colors.

His wardrobe had some flying colors, too. He’d never met anything polyester or nylon he didn’t love. The brighter, the better. If colors clashed, he either didn’t notice or didn’t care. His outfits were almost as horrendous as the china figurines clogging the shelves that weren’t full of aspirins or decongestants.

Some people did that kind of thing as shtick. Louise could imagine either of her grown sons wearing some of Jared’s clothes if they decided that was a hoot. But the pharmacist wasn’t doing it to be cool. He did it because those were the clothes he wore.

And his hobbies… ! He was around Louise’s age: in his early fifties. He wasn’t gay, or she didn’t think he was. But his music of choice was Broadway show tunes. He knew how many performances the most obscure musicals had run, and who’d replaced whom in the cast, and when, and often why. He knew songs that had got cut in tryouts, for crying out loud.

Louise had nothing against Broadway musicals, even if they didn’t float her boat. When Jared started going on about European soccer clubs, though, that was when she started looking around for the closest handy blunt instrument.

Not that he cared. He went on and on about how Barcelona played the game the way it should be played, and how they were better than Real Madrid. He told her Barcelona wore blue and red stripes because the Swiss maniac who started the club there came from Basel, which already had a team in blue and red stripes. He talked about Bayer Leverkusen, and about the aspirin tablet on their coat of arms. He bored her with Juventus of Turin, and A.C. Milan, and Inter Milan. He blathered about Sir Alex Ferguson, Manchester United’s longtime coach. He sang the praises of the Gunners of Arsenal, the Blues of Chelsea, and the Iron of Scunthorpe—though that last bunch seemed to be in whatever the Brits called the minor leagues.

His enthusiasm—his mania—didn’t stop at the borders of Europe. He had kind words for the Black Stars of Ghana and the Indomitable Lions of Cameroon and the Elephants of the Ivory Coast. He explained that there was a club called Corinthians in Brazil, a Liverpool in Uruguay, and another Arsenal in Argentina because of tours the original English sides had taken in the early years of the twentieth century. He even occasionally mentioned the L.A. Galaxy of the MLS, who were based in the South Bay (though he used Minor League Soccer as often as Major to spell out the league’s acronym).

He was, in short, a piece of work. Louise cared nothing for any sport, a dislike she’d passed on to Vanessa. She particularly didn’t care for American football. She’d never loathed soccer all that much before, mostly because it hadn’t shown up on her radar screen. Now it did, and she discovered it was at least as annoying as its Yankee cousin.

And, short of using that blunt instrument, she was stuck listening to Jared go on and on about it whenever things got slow in the drugstore. Most of the time, in other words. Combining his obsessions, he even told her there’d been a musical about soccer.

“But only in London,” he assured her. “They never brought it to the States—they didn’t think it would draw.” He sighed, mourning American ignorance. He soon brightened, though. “We did have Good News in the Twenties, about our kind of football. And Damn Yankees, of course.” That last came out with a distinct sniff; he didn’t care for baseball.

“Of course,” Louise echoed. She’d at least heard of Damn Yankees, which was more than she’d done with all those stupid goddamn soccer clubs.

Jared paid her. She didn’t exactly know how, considering that things at the pharmacy weren’t what anyone would call swift, but he did. Except for talking too much about things that didn’t interest her, he made a good boss. He never gave her trouble if she needed time off because James Henry was sick or had to go to the dentist or whatever the hell.

She knew she should count her blessings. She did, along with the dollars from her checks on the first and fifteenth of every month. She tried, as subtly as she knew how, to suggest to him that her interests ran in different directions. It didn’t work. She didn’t need long to decide that she could scream Will you shut the fuck up? without cutting the endless chatter about soccer and musicals, musicals and soccer.

She was there at the pharmacy the afternoon the blizzard hit Los Angeles. They’d had snow every winter since the supervolcano eruption, snow several times a winter most years since. But Louise, a Southern California native, had never seen anything like this swirling whiteness.

“Wow,” she said, pointing out through the front window. “I mean, is this Chicago or what?”

Jared’s eyes widened. The magnifying lenses of his glasses made them look owl-big. “That’s amazing,” he said. “When it gets this bad, a lot of the time they play with a yellow ball, or an orange one.”

“Do they?” Louise said tonelessly. For all she knew, or cared, the ball they used when it wasn’t snowing like the North Pole might have been pink with green polka dots. Before Jared could go They sure do and then tell her more she didn’t want to hear, she added, “I’m just wondering how we’ll get home in this.”

He rubbed his chin. When he wasn’t talking about soccer or Broadway, he sometimes said he wanted to grow a beard to see if it helped keep his face warm, but he hadn’t done it yet. “I know they’ve got chains for the buses,” he said. “They’ve used them before.”

Louise nodded—they had. But if they had to summon the buses to some central garage to get the chains, the schedule would end up screwed, blued, and tattooed. And… “I’m glad the bus stop is right across the street. I’m not sure I could find it in this if I had to go much farther. I have to walk a little ways from where I get off to my condo. That should be fun.”

“I’ve got a bit of a walk, too.” He clicked his tongue between his teeth. “Something to look forward to. An adventure.”

“I heard somewhere that an adventure was somebody else have a miserable time a long way away,” Louise said. She startled a laugh out of Jared.

He let her leave early. It wasn’t as if they were doing a lot of business, or any business at all. She was wearing Nikes. She wished she’d thought to stick galoshes in her purse, but she hadn’t, so all she could do was wish. She also wished that, like a faithful Saint Bernard, she could carry a keg of brandy on a chain around her neck.

When she got outside and the wailing northwest wind smacked her in the face, she wished for the brandy even more. The traffic lights at the corner of Van Slyke and Reynoso Drive were working, but she could see them only by fits and starts, when the gale chanced to blow away most of the snow between her and them.

She crossed the street against the light. She didn’t worry about getting hit by a car. Hardly anyone drove on the roads even when the weather was better than this. Anybody who’d get into a car now had to be crazier than Jared Watt, which was really saying something. The same went for bike riders—or she thought so till one pedaled past her.

She tripped over the snow-hidden curb on the far side of the street, but didn’t quite fall. Brushing snow off the bus bench, she sat down. She hoped again the bus wouldn’t be too late—it was bloody cold out here, and the wind didn’t help. Duh! It was cold enough to be snowing. It never used to get that cold in SoCal. It wasn’t just cold enough to snow now. It felt a lot colder than that. Cold enough to freeze to death in? Her coat was pretty good, but the side of her face the wind hit was starting to go numb.

Another guy on a bike zoomed by, head down, working hard. That would keep you warmer than just sitting around. Louise wondered whether she ought to get up and start doing jumping jacks or something. It might be a good idea, but she didn’t have the energy.

She also had no idea the bus was anywhere within miles till it loomed up out of the snow in front of her. The fare had just gone up to five dollars. She’d never been so glad to feed a fin into the slot. She would have paid a lot more to get out of that horrible wind. The bus’ heater even worked after a fashion.

Getting off was a lot less enjoyable than getting on had been. It was growing dark—growing dark fast. The snow danced and swirled in the air, for all the world as if this were somewhere in Connecticut, or maybe in a movie from the 1940s. God only knew what things were really like in Connecticut these days. Movies had nothing to do with anything real.

By the time Louise made it home, she was wishing for both steaming coffee and earmuffs. I want to get out of these clothes and into a dry martini. Somebody’d said that, though she couldn’t remember who. She didn’t give a damn about a dry martini. If they’d made a hot martini, now…

“It’s snowing, Mommy! It’s snowing!” James Henry squealed when she walked through the door. It was a big deal to him. Hell, it was fun to him—he hadn’t had to sit out in it or slog through it.

Louise had. “Really?” she said. “I never would have noticed.”

Her younger son by Colin came to the door. “I’m outa here,” Marshall said, “or I will be… .” He held out his hand. He didn’t even pretend he was doing this for anything but mercenary reasons.

After she’d given him enough greenbacks to make him stick his hand in his pocket, Louise said, “Be careful when you’re going back to the house. It’s brutal out there—worse than I’ve ever seen it before.”

“I’ll cope,” he said, but paused a moment right outside the door when the wind smacked him in the kisser. “Whoa! It is kinda rugged,” he allowed.

“Ya think?” Louise closed the door on him—she didn’t want the storm to chill down the inside of the condo. Marshall vanished from sight even before he got to the bottom of the stairs.

“Can we make a snowman, Mommy?” James Henry asked.

“Maybe right in the middle of the living room,” Louise answered. James Henry clapped his hands. He didn’t realize she was joking. Outside, the snow kept blowing and falling, falling and blowing. It wasn’t freezing inside the condo, but it wasn’t what anybody would have called warm, either. When Louise sighed, she could see her own breath. She might not have been joking so much after all.

Before she had Deborah, Kelly Ferguson had known babies were a lot of work—labor didn’t stop once the kid popped out. She’d known, yes, in an intellectual way. In that same intellectual way, she’d had a fair notion of what would happen to the world after the Yellowstone supervolcano blew.

In both cases, intellectual knowledge was one thing. Actual experience was something else again. The difference between the two was at least as profound as the difference between a picture of a steak on the one hand and the real steak first on a plate and then in your stomach on the other.

With the supervolcano, the country’s work afterwards boiled down to trying to pick up the pieces. Kelly did a lot of that with Deborah, too. But her work changed a lot faster than the country’s did. Deborah was more than a year old now, toddling unsteadily on legs that were still figuring out how to hold her up and coming out with more and more words every day.

Mama and Dada and Asha—which did duty for Marshall—had arrived very early. Dada arrived well before Mama did, which annoyed Kelly and amused Colin. “Happened the same way with my other three, too,” he told her. “That bugged the dickens out of Louise—oh, you bet it did.” He chuckled. “Marshall said her new rugrat did the exact same thing, so my guess is she got bugged all over again.”

“How about that?” Kelly remembered saying. From then on, she tried not to complain about how Deborah was learning to talk. Being thought of as like the first wife was nothing a sensible second wife wanted. And chances were that sooner or later, no matter how she learned them, Deborah would learn to say hard words like Constantinople and Timbuktu. From boxes, Colin had pulled out most of the Dr. Seuss titles that had also taught Kelly to read.

The biggest problem with kids was, they found ways to do dumbass things no matter how careful you were. Kelly was changing Deborah on a towel on the bed. She looked away for a split second to grab the baby powder. She looked back just in time to see Deborah, grinning from ear to ear, roll over… and off. Then she heard a thump, and then she heard a wail of surprise, pain, and fear.

She grabbed her daughter. She wondered if any of the cars would start so she could rush the baby to the ER. Then she realized Deborah wasn’t badly damaged—wasn’t, in fact, damaged at all. As soon as Mommy had her, everything was fine again.

“They’ll do it to you, all right,” Colin agreed when Kelly told the gruesome story over dinner. “Hey, I didn’t have a single gray hair—not one—before I had kids.” He ran a hand through his hair. His hairline hadn’t retreated a millimeter, but the color up there kept fading toward silver. He scowled, interrogation-room style, at Marshall. “See what you did to me?”

Kelly guessed he intimidated suspects in the interrogation room more than he did his younger son. “Yeah, right,” Marshall said. “Like, what are you blaming me for? I was third in line. By the time I came along, I bet you were already sneaking Just for Men into the bathroom.”

“Why d’you think I’m blaming you?” Colin rumbled. “I can’t get at Rob or Vanessa, but you’re right across the table from me.”

“That’s how cops decide how to arrest people, too, right?” Marshall asked helpfully.

He didn’t faze his father a bit. “A lot of the time, it is,” Colin answered. “And you know what else? A lot of the time, we grab the perp when we do it. Not always, but a lot of the time.”

From what Colin had told her of his older son, Kelly thought Rob would have yelled Death to the pigs! or some other endearment. Marshall just shrugged and shoveled another forkful of macaroni and cheese into his face.

Food was expensive, unexciting, and sometimes scarce. Kelly tended a backyard garden. So did most people who had back yards to garden in, in SoCal, throughout the USA, and in the rest of the developed world. Countries that had been hurting for food even before the eruption were worse off now. The messed-up weather disrupted their crops, and nobody was selling much grain across borders. Several small-scale wars simmered in Africa and Asia because too many countries had too many hungry citizens.

Deborah, of course, stuffed literally anything she could get her hands on into her mouth. What else were hands for but grabbing things and bringing them to your mouth? It might be food, after all.

Or it might not. Kelly discovered that the flesh of her flesh had swallowed a button when she found it as a souvenir Deborah left in her diaper. It obviously hadn’t injured the baby. The button didn’t seem hurt, either, but Kelly threw it out anyhow.

“I don’t know where she got it,” Kelly said that night, still jittery over what might have been. “I would have taken it away if I’d seen it, and I swear I kept an eye on her all the time.”

Colin took it better than she did: an advantage, no doubt, of this being his fourth time around the track, as opposed to her first. “Babies do things like that, is all,” he said. “Most of the time, everything turns out okay. They’re tough critters. If they weren’t, none of ’em’d ever live to grow up.”

“I guess.” Till she had one, Kelly’d thought of babies as hothouse flowers that would wilt if you looked at them the wrong way. What with her swan dive from the bed and the button sticking out of her poop, Deborah was changing her mother’s preconceptions. All the same, Kelly said, “But what if the button’d got stuck inside her? We would’ve had to take her to the hospital, and they might have needed to operate to get it out.”

“Purple fur,” Marshall said.

“Huh?” Kelly wasn’t sure she’d heard straight.

“Purple fur,” Marshall repeated. “From Telly Monster on Sesame Street. He worried about everything, remember? So we’d say somebody who worried about things that weren’t worth worrying about had purple fur—like you just now.”

Kelly thought anything that had to do with Deborah worth worrying about. But now she knew what purple fur meant—and (again, in an intellectual way) she understood what Marshall was talking about.

Once Deborah reached the upright position, she could grab all kinds of things she hadn’t been able to get at while she was rolling and crawling. Kelly and Colin kidproofed the house as well as they could. Anything Deborah could pick up and try to eat went on a shelf too high for her to reach. All the electrical outlets that didn’t have cords sticking out of them got plastic plugs so the baby couldn’t stick her wet fingers or anything else into them.

“This won’t be perfect, you know,” Colin said. “She’ll figure out ways to land in trouble that we can’t even imagine. They always do.”

Kelly didn’t like that. “We’re supposed to be there for them, to protect them.”

“Uh-huh.” Her husband nodded. “But sometimes that means sweeping up whatever’s broken and putting on the Band-Aids after it’s too darn late to do anything else.”

She didn’t like that, either. She wanted to make her offspring perfectly safe, invulnerable to harm. The rational part of her brain insisted she couldn’t do that, but didn’t stop her from wanting to.

Little by little, Deborah got the idea that there were things she was supposed to do and things she wasn’t. She was a good kid. Most of the time, she did what her parents wanted. Most of the time, but not always. Once in a while, she would throw things down on the ground to smash them and see how much noise they made. Or she’d try to bite the hand that kept her from doing something or going somewhere.

Kelly and Colin yelled at her to stop. The first time Colin swatted Deborah on her diapered fanny, Kelly was appalled. It created more noise than pain, but she was appalled anyhow. “She’s a person! You shouldn’t hit her!” she exclaimed. “It’ll mess her up.”

“I got walloped plenty when I was a little kid. I earned it, too,” Colin answered. “I spanked my older kids. I never hit them with a belt or hit them in the face, the way I got it sometimes—I thought that was going over the line. But they aren’t too warped, and I’m not, either. Little kids are a lot like puppies or kittens. Sometimes they need to know that doing the wrong thing means you get hurt.”

“All the child-raising books are dead against it.” Like most academics, Kelly valued expert opinions.

Colin only shrugged. “Mike Pitcavage never warmed Darren’s behind, and look what a drug-dealing son of a… gun his spoiled brat turned out to be.”

“Oh, boy,” Kelly said. “If he’d scared his kid into being a law-abiding citizen, he’d still be going out there and murdering old ladies whenever he got the urge.”

She did make Colin flinch; she had to admit that. But she didn’t make him back down. “You know what I mean,” he said.

“I may know, but I still think you’re wrong,” she answered. “A lot of the time, people hit kids to make themselves feel better. That’s not a good enough reason, not in my book.”

“Ha! You’ll find out!” he said, and, much as she wished she could, she couldn’t ignore the certainty in his voice. He had years’ more experience in such things than she did. He went on, “I didn’t say smack ’em all the time. I didn’t even say to do it very often. You do it a lot, it stops meaning much. But every once in a while, you’ll decide it’s the only way you can make sure they get the point.”

“Hmp,” she said, a syllable that meant I don’t believe it for a minute. They left it there; they didn’t do much out-and-out quarreling. Time would tell which of them had it straight, or if either one did.