Supervolcano: Eruption

III

“Well, we’re here,” Colin said as he pulled into the driveway. San Atanasio was only a few minutes away from LAX. Colin despised the airport. Who in his right mind didn’t? But the trip back and forth was easy enough.

Rain drummed on the roof of his middle-aged Taurus and splashed off the windshield. In the passenger seat, Kelly Birnbaum grinned a crooked grin. “Why don’t we ever meet when it’s sunny?”

“Hey, it’s February. Even L.A. gets rain in February. Sometimes, anyhow,” Colin said.

“I know,” she admitted. “It was coming down even harder in Norcal, I’ll tell you that.”

He thumbed the trunk button. “Head for the porch. I’ll grab your bag.”

“Such a gentleman.” Her eyes twinkled.

Several raindrops nailed his bifocals before he could get under cover himself. He wasn’t wearing a cap now, the way he had in Yellowstone. He wiped off most of the water with a hankie and undid the dead bolt and the regular lock. Then-a gentleman-he held the door open for Kelly. “Go on in.”

She did. “It’s so big,” she marveled.

“It’s just a house.”

“When you’ve lived in dorms and grad-student apartments and tents as much as I have, a house looks humongous. I freak out when I visit my parents down here, and their place is smaller than this. You’ve got it all to yourself, too.”

“Yeah,” Colin said tightly. “Marshall visits sometimes. His room still has his junk in it. The rest… It’s mine, all right, such as it is.”

Kelly caught the edge in his voice. “Sorry. I’ve got foot-in-mouth disease.”

“Don’t worry about it. If I didn’t have this place all to myself, I wouldn’t have pried your phone number out of you when we started talking there by the lake, and I’m darn glad I did.” He set a hand on her shoulder.

She moved closer to him. “Me, too.” She looked around some more. “Everything is so neat. Books, DVDs, CDs-they’re all where they belong. I have to paw through piles of trash to find anything.”

“Navy hangover,” he said with a shrug. “Want something wet?”

“A beer, I think. But give me the tour first.”

“Okay. You’ve got to remember, most of the stuff on the tables and the shelves and all is Louise’s taste.” That taste ran to sad-faced icons, enamelware boxes, and figurines that nested one inside another. Colin didn’t know why his ex had wanted to make the place look like a cheap imitation of the Hermitage, but she had. Thinking back on it, some of the pieces hadn’t been so cheap. Way too late to worry about it now.

“Well, Russian art is something different, anyway,” Kelly said diplomatically.

One upstairs bedroom had a closed door with yellow tape reading POLICE LINE-DO NOT CROSS! running from the top left corner to the bottom right. “Marshall’s,” Colin said dryly.

“Duh!” Kelly winked at him.

Colin’s study was next door, with his computer and more bookshelves. It looked out on the backyard. Some wet sparrows and mourning doves pecked seed from a tray feeder.

“I like this,” Kelly said. “It feels like you.”

“No saints on the wall here,” Colin replied, which might have been agreement. He also had a work niche in the master bedroom, the next stop. He’d been using it more since he didn’t need to worry about waking up Louise by turning on a light at odd hours. Kelly didn’t seem to care about that. She was looking at the bed. Colin needed no grad school to work out why. “If it bothers you, there’s still a bed in what used to be Vanessa’s room. All the bedclothes are new since-well, since. Same old mattress, though.”

She thought about it for a few seconds. Then she said, “That should be okay. Now what about that beer?”

They went downstairs. The kitchen was also humongous, at least if you listened to Kelly. As Colin poured a couple of Sierra Nevada Pale Ales (he’d drunk Bud, but going with Kelly had opened his eyes to the notion of good beer), he said, “I know why you say that all the time.”

“Say what all the time?”

“Humongous. It’s what you guys call the top end of eruptions. A real technical term, like perpetrator or something.”

“You’ve been reading books again.” Kelly sounded amused and accusing at the same time.

“Guilty. I didn’t know it wasn’t in the rules.” Colin raised his glass. The pale ale was several shades darker than Bud, which was, now that he thought about it, the color of piss. This brew had real ingredients in it. “Here’s to us.” They solemnly clinked, then drank. The pale ale had real flavor in it, too. A damn shame it cost as if it did.

“To us.” Kelly glanced around the kitchen, which was as clean and tidy as the rest of the house. “I still get nervous saying that.”

“How come?” Alarm bells jangled in Colin’s mind. He was pretty sure he’d found a good one, a keeper. Was she having doubts she’d found one? If she was… idn’t know what he’d do if she was.

“Because people who go through divorces are usually crazy for a couple of years afterwards,” she answered seriously. “God knows I’ve watched enough grad-school marriages explode.”

God knew Colin had watched enough cops’ marriages explode, including Gabe Sanchez’s and his own. If you were crazy, did you know you were crazy? If you knew you were crazy, did that mean you weren’t really crazy after all or only that you couldn’t do anything about it? A DA would argue one way, a defense attorney the other.

He’d seen people do some pretty nutso things after their marriages crashed and burned-no two ways about that. He’d seen guys date women and women hook up with guys they never would have looked at twice if they were in their right minds. Most of them regretted it soon enough. One or two made it work. He’d also seen one guy smash his truck and end up in a wheelchair with gazillions in medical and legal bills because he hopped in while he was drowning his sorrows. And one pretty good cop had got buried in a closed coffin because not even a mortician could make him presentable after he ate his gun.

Suicide scared cops shitless, not least because it sometimes seemed contagious. If one guy did himself in, it could happen that a couple of weeks later someone else, someone nobody’d thought had any big troubles, also took the long road out. Spooky.

Colin didn’t want to feel spooky right now, which was putting it mildly. Kelly hadn’t flown down from the East Bay to make him feel spooky. He hoped like hell she hadn’t, anyhow. He put his hand on her shoulder again. She smiled and moved closer to him, the way she had before. That eased his mind.

“So how’s the supervolcano doing?” he asked casually.

Her smile winked out like a blown candle flame. Maybe he’d spooked her. “My chairman doesn’t like what it’s doing,” she said, the way Colin might have said The chief wouldn’t like that. She went on, “And I really don’t like what it’s doing.”

“I’ve seen stuff in the papers,” he said, nodding. “More quakes over 5.0, the geysers’ schedules all fouled up…”

“Yeah, the tourists get upset when Old Faithful doesn’t go off right on time.” Kelly didn’t bother hiding her scorn. “But that’s only part of what I mean-the part that makes the papers and sometimes even the TV news. The worst things don’t. They only show up in surveyors’ records and satellite radar readings.”

“How do you mean?” Colin asked.

“The magma domes are bulging. Pushing up. Especially the new one, the one under Coffee Pot Springs,” Kelly said. “Moving up by feet where they moved by inches even just a couple of years ago.”

That led to the obvious question, so Colin came out with it: “Is it getting ready to blow, then?”

“Nobody knows. We’ve never observed a supervolcano eruption before, so how can we tell for sure what we’ve got?” The way Kelly knocked back a big gulp of beer said she sure didn’t like what they had. “Something’s going to happen, though. Maybe it’ll go back down again. It could. Maybe there’ll be ordinary volcanic eruptions. We haven’t had any for seventy thousand years, give or take, and they might relieve the pressure. Or maybe you can drop Rhode Island half a mile straight down.”

“Your chairman will know people-people in the government, I meanolin said slowly. “So will the other scientists who study this thing. Are they jumping up and down, trying to make the Feds pay attention in case Yellowstone does go kaboom? There ought to be… contingency plans, they call ’em in the service.”

“I know the geologists are talking to people in the Interior Department,” Kelly answered. “And I know they’re having trouble getting anybody to listen to them. It’s a-” She broke off, groping for the word. “A question of scale, I guess you’d say.”

She paused again, plainly wondering if she’d have to explain. She didn’t. “The South Bay Strangler’s murdered fifteen little old ladies now. That’s a story. People understand it. It gets splashed all over CNN Headline News,” Colin said, his voice thick with disgust. “But what Hitler did, and Stalin, and Mao-you can’t take in numbers like that and what they mean. A good thing, too. Anybody who could feel all those millions of murders would have to go nuts, wouldn’t he?”

“You’d hope so,” Kelly said.

“Uh-huh. You would,” Colin agreed. “So the Interior Department guys can’t wrap their heads around the supervolcano?”

“Not even close,” Kelly said. “They see the studies, and they go, ‘It can’t be this bad.’ And what our people give them is always cautious and careful and conservative. Even that’s enough to make them not take it in. Or they say, ‘If it really does what you say it’ll do, what’s the point of planning for it? It’s too big.’ ”

“Bend over and kiss your behind good-bye.” Colin wasn’t quite old enough to remember drop-and-cover drills in school, but he knew plenty of people who were.

“Yeah. Like that. Except the supervolcano is so much bigger than an H-bomb, it’s not even funny,” Kelly said.

“It isn’t radioactive,” Colin pointed out. “No fallout.”

“Well, no,” she allowed. “Not like you mean. But it would put so much ash in the air…” She laughed, shakily. “We sure have cheerful things to talk about, don’t we? Stranglers and supervolcanoes. Oh, my!”

“They’re what we do. And it’s better than not talking,” Colin said. After the kids got out of the house, he and Louise had hardly said anything to each other for days at a time. She didn’t care about policework. She’d cared that he hadn’t been chosen chief, but that was because she’d lost face through his failure. And he hadn’t worried about how she got through her days. With any brains in his head, he would have noticed that that was a bad sign. Aerobics class? Hey, why not?

Kelly held up her empty glass. “I think I could use a refill.”

Colin’s glass was empty, too. He didn’t recall finishing the beer, but if he hadn’t a drunk pixie was hiding in one of the cabinets. “Motion seconded and passed by acclamation,” he said, and opened the fridge.

She gave him a quizzical look. “You talk funny sometimes, you know?”

“Too many City Council meetings. They’d make a penguin go jogging in the Mojave, honest to God they would.”

Kelly snorted. “You do talk funny.”

He’d heard that before from his fellow cops. He’d also got dressed down by his superiors for writing reports in English rather than police jargon. Jesus! No wonder I never made chief, he thought. If anybody ever came out and just d what goes on in a cop shop, they’d ride him out of town on a rail. They’d have to.

Some of his bitterness at getting passed over went away. The administrative part of the job would have been a piece of cake. Knowing which asses to kiss and when, on the other hand… Even if he’d tried, he would have made a hash of it. A police chief had to be a pol, too, and that just wasn’t part of his makeup.

The second beers vanished faster than the first ones had. “What do you want to do now?” Colin asked.

“Could I take a shower?” Kelly said. “You go through the airport and you sit on a plane, you feel all grubby even if the flight only lasts an hour. And after that, well, who knows?” She grinned at him.

“Sounds better than anything else I can think of,” Colin said.

She came out of the bathroom off the master bedroom naked. Colin lay on the bed waiting for her. She grinned again. “Oh, good,” she said. “You turned up the heat.”

“We aren’t wearing clothes. No insulation,” he said gravely. And he knew damn well that any woman ever born would shiver at temperatures he thought fine. He had no idea why things worked like that, but they did.

She got down beside him. It felt a little strange, a little awkward-the more so for him because it was their first time here, in this bedroom full of memories. He’d gone up to Berkeley a few times before, but they were still learning what floated whose boat. With Louise, after all those years, he’d known.

Or he’d thought so. If he were as smart as that, how come she’d bailed on him? If people generally were as smart as they thought they were, they’d be a hell of a lot smarter than they really were. Cops learned that fast. Most crooks-not all, but most-were crooks because they were dopes.

All of which went through his head in odd moments when he wasn’t otherwise distracted. Before long, he stopped having moments like that. Much too soon, or so it seemed, he lay on his back, holding an imaginary cigarette between his first two fingers and blowing an imaginary plume of smoke up toward the cottage-cheese ceiling.

She laughed. The rain tapped softly at the roof. Then, suddenly, there was a much bigger noise up there-something alive running from one side of the house to the other. “What the devil was that?” Kelly said.

“Squirrel,” Colin answered. “Just a rat with a pretty tail. You can hear crows up there too sometimes. Wildlife.” He made a face. “Not like Yellowstone, even if we do get coons and coyotes and skunks every once in a while. Possums, too.”

“Yeah, we have possums in Berkeley,” Kelly said. “A guy I dated a few times-grad student in biology-called ’em junk mammals.”

“Pretty good name,” Colin said, and let it go right there. Of course she’d gone with guys before him. He didn’t want to know all the gory details. He snooped for a living. He didn’t care to do it on his own time. The way she relaxed beside him, just a little, showed he’d passed one more test.

Was he going to stay crazy for another year and then some? If he was, present company seemed pretty good. He started to tell her so. Before the words came out, he noticed her eyelids had slid shut. He lay there quietly. In a few minutes, her breathing said she’d fallen asleep. He sometimes thought sleeping-really sleeping-with someone was more intimate, more trusting, than merely going to bed.

And he could tease her for doing what everyone said guys always did. Or he could have, if he hadn’t started softly snoring himself about ninety seconds later.

If I jump, God, will You catch me? Louise Ferguson remembered wondering about that a few days before she finally nerved herself to walk out on the emptiness that had been her marriage. Which was pretty funny, when you got right down to it, because most of the time religion meant Easter eggs or Christmas presents or a wedding or a funeral. Except for those last two, she couldn’t remember when she’d set foot in a church.

But you needed to think of something outside yourself-didn’t you? — when you turned your life upside down and inside out. Back in the day, she would have been a scandal. Prominent police officer’s wife runs away with younger man! People would have cut her dead on the street-except for the ones who wished they had the nerve to bail out of their dead marriages, too.

She rather missed being a scandal. One of Colin’s unen-dearing endearments for her was drama queen. These days, though, anybody who couldn’t stand living with somebody else another second went ahead and quit, and no one got up in arms about it.

She might even have been a role model for Vanessa, who’d dumped her live-in boyfriend (even having one, much less dumping him, would have been another scandal back in the day) not long after the breakup with Colin. Louise sighed. Now she had a companion fifteen years younger than her daughter’s.

Louise wasn’t inclined to judge. I’m not a judgmental person, she often told herself. It was an odd way of asserting autonomy, but it worked for her. Colin not only was judgmental, he was proud of it, too. She’d never known a cop who wasn’t, and she’d known a lot of cops.

Vanessa was also judgmental, and competitive, and several other things her father was. When she set her chin and looked stubborn, she might have been Colin reborn. She’d always had that air, even when she was only three years old.

Louise’s cell phone rang. Actually, it started playing “Addicted to Love.” The old word stuck, though, even if the noise the phone made had nothing to do with a landline’s boring, squawky ring. She fished the phone out of her purse, which sat on the severely modern couch in Teo’s condo.

“Hello?”

“Hi, Mom.”

“Hello, Vanessa. I was just thinking about you.” Louise wasn’t going to tell her one and only daughter how she’d been thinking about her. Keep it nice if you can had been drilled into her when she was a little girl. She’d tried to drill it into Vanessa, too, but she hadn’t had much luck. “What’s going on?” Something had to be; Vanessa didn’t call her to pass the time of day.

“Hagop’s moving to Denver.” Her daughter couldn’t have sounded more tragic if she’d just watched a crowded orphanage go up in flames.

“Is he?” Louise tried to hold her voice as flat as she could. She didn’t know why Vanessa had taken up with a man old enough to be her father. Well, she knew some of the reason: Hagop wasn’t Bryce Miller and wasn’t anything like Bryce Miller. She made no effort to tell that to Vanessa. She knew useless when she saw it.

“Yeah,” Vanessa said. “The business climate is better there. That’s what he says. Lower taxes, fewer hassles, the whole nine yards.” She paused. Now she’s going to tell me whatever she really calltell me, Louise thought. Vanessa let the pause stretch long enough for the thought to form very clearly. Then she said, “So I’m going with him.”

“To Denver?” Louise exclaimed. “To live?” Vanessa had lived in or near San Atanasio her whole life. She thought a shopping expedition to South Coast Plaza in Orange County was like a safari in Burkina Faso.

But she said, “That’s right. I’ve already started looking for jobs online. I’m sick of working for this idiot, anyway-am I ever.”

Are you sick of your paycheck? Louise had had some sudden, painful lessons about money since she’d stopped banking Colin’s checks on the tenth and twenty-fifth of every month. But Vanessa was good with computers. She’d find something with more certainty to it than arranging dried flowers. Louise was liable to have to find something like that herself, dammit.

“I thought I should probably tell you,” Vanessa said, and by her tone of voice she’d been in some doubt.

“What does, uh, Hagop”-funny name! — “think about you packing up and moving to be with him?”

“He was surprised,” Vanessa said. I’ll bet he was, her mother thought. She went on, “But he got used to the idea okay.”

“Did he?” Louise had wondered if the older man was leaving town not least to get away. Maybe not. Something else occurred to her: “Have you told your father yet?”

“Oh, sure,” Vanessa said carelessly. “He doesn’t want me to do it.”

“I know he’s not crazy about Hagop…” Louise wasn’t, either, but didn’t want her opinions associated with Colin’s.

“It wasn’t that.” Now her daughter sounded impatient. Vanessa was good at that. “He kept going on that Denver was too close to what’s cooking under Yellowstone Park. Is he okay? He sounded kind of, I don’t know, loopy about it.”

“Oh.” Now Louise understood what was going on. “You don’t need to lose any sleep about him, I don’t think. He’s got a, ah, lady friend who studies volcanoes, so no wonder he’s all excited about them.”

“But there aren’t any volcanoes in Yellowstone, are there?”

“I don’t know. But that’s what this woman, girl, whatever she is, studies.” Louise’s spies-people from the old neighborhood-were sure about that. Come to think of it, Marshall had said something about it, too. Louise hadn’t put it together with the other till now.

Vanessa went on with her own train of thought, the way she often did: “Besides, Denver’s, like, four hundred miles from Yellowstone. More, even. I looked on a map. Dad must not have. He doesn’t usually freak out over nothing, but he sure did this time.”

“Okay.” Louise was thinking about Denver a different way. It was one more milepost marking how the family was fragmenting, with all the people going their own way. Modern families did that. It was part of how things worked. Rob spent so much time on the road with his silly band, he was like a stranger when he did drift back into town.

“Listen, Mom, I’ve gotta go. Break’s about over,” Vanessa said. “I’ll try to come by before I move, or maybe we can have lunch or something. ’Bye.”

“ ’Bye,” Louise echoed, but she was talking to a dead phone. She sighed again and stowed hers in her handbag. She’d spent upwardsf twenty years- the best years of my life, she thought, sincerely if not originally-raising the kids. And for what? To see them scatter to the winds, the way kids did. From their point of view, it was as if she hadn’t done a goddamn thing.

Which meant… what? She frowned. Thinking about What Stuff Meant-in capital letters-wasn’t something she did every day, or every week, either. Her style had always been more along the lines of do whatever you do, then see what happens next.

Besides, frowning wasn’t a good plan, not if the man in your bed was younger than you were. Wrinkles stayed. Deliberately, she made her face relax. Teo was so sweet. He said he appreciated all the things she knew, all the things she did with a lack of inhibition that amazed her when she noticed it. Had Colin ever noticed? Had he cared? Not likely!

Well, if she wasn’t going to live for her kids, who was she going to live for? She surprised herself by answering the question out loud: “For me, that’s who. And you know what else? It’s about time!”

She started to pull the compact out of her purse, then stopped. To scope herself out at close range with that teeny-tiny mirror, she’d have to put on her reading glasses. She didn’t want to be reminded that she needed reading glasses, not right now she didn’t. She walked into the bathroom instead.

Yes, that was better. She could inspect herself here at a distance her eyes were able to handle on their own. Okay, she had fine lines at the corners of those eyes. Okay, some of the lines on her forehead weren’t so fine. Time went by, no matter how little you wanted it to. And she’d spent a lot of afternoons tanning when she was younger. She’d looked terrific then. Her skin would be smoother and softer now if she hadn’t.

Her hair was perfect. That was a line from an old song, but she couldn’t come up with the rest of it. She was, by God, still a honey blonde. If she had some gray roots, that was between her and the Clairol people. And she kept the bottle with her tampons and pads, where Teo wouldn’t stumble over it.

What she really hated was the sag under her chin. It wasn’t bad, not yet, but it was there. And her upper arms flopped sometimes. She’d had a high-school English teacher whose arm did the shimmy whenever she wrote on the board. The kids, heartless with youth, had laughed at her. It didn’t seem so funny any more.

“My boobs sag, too,” Louise said sadly. With a bra, it didn’t show. But there were times, important times, when you weren’t wearing a bra. And Teo’s mouth and fingers would know her flesh was less resilient than it had been when Colin started pawing her. Nurse three kids and that was what happened.

She turned around and looked back at herself over her shoulder. Her ass was too damn wide. That also came from having three kids… and from having all the years she did her best not to think about.

She was what she was. Most of the parts still worked most of the time. With as many miles as she had on her, and some of the bumpy roads her life had banged over, how could she ask for more? How? Simple. She wanted everything to work the way it had when she was Vanessa’s age. That wasn’t gonna happen, but she wanted it anyhow. Who didn’t?

When she went back to the front room, she turned on the Food Network. She wasn’t a great cook-Colin had once accused her of being able to burn water-but she liked watching whizzes put meals together. I could do that, she’d think, even if she was one of the people for whom God cn Hamburger Helper. They made everything look so easy, though. If TVs came with smell attachments… Wow!

After a while, she punched the remote. She didn’t flip through channels the way a man would, but she wasn’t locked in. MSNBC said the Iranians were doing something or other the President didn’t like. Louise went back to the Food Network, and then on to Oxygen. The Iranians had been doing things Presidents didn’t like for, well, for ever.

Footsteps on the stairs. Louise brightened. She knew those light, bright steps. A key went into the lock, and then into the dead bolt. The door opened. In bounced Teo, as fresh as when he’d left this morning-literally, because he’d showered again at the gym.

Louise smiled a thousand-watt smile. “Darling!” she said, and all but threw herself into his arms.

“So how are those Greek poets?” Colin asked Bryce Miller. They sat across the dining-room table from each other, a chessboard between them. Colin had a cup of coffee in front of him; Vanessa’s ex-boyfriend, a Coke.

“I’m getting there-diss’ll be done next year, maybe year after next,” Bryce answered. He was tall and skinny and pale almost to translucence, with curly red hair and a wispy little beard. After due consideration, he pushed a pawn.

Colin took it. He played chess the way he approached most problems: with straightforward aggression. He simplified ruthlessly and tried not to make too many dumbass mistakes. Against a lot of opponents, that was plenty good enough. Against Bryce, he won maybe one game in five: enough to keep him interested, not enough to let him imagine they were in the same league.

Bryce moved a knight. Colin wagged a finger at him. That nasty horse would fork his queen and a rook if he didn’t do something about it. He moved the queen to threaten the knight and the forking square. Bryce covered it with a bishop.

Okay, Colin thought. Now I can get on with my own attack. He moved a bishop of his own, over on the other side of the board.

Bryce had long, thin fingers. He picked up the knight the way a surgeon might lift a scalpel. He took a pawn with it. “Check,” he said regretfully.

One of Colin’s pawns could wipe it from the board. But as soon as he did that, Bryce’s bishop would assassinate his queen. He eyed the board for a moment, considering his chances after losing the queen. He saw only two, bad and worse. He tipped over his king.

“You got me good that time,” he said. “I saw the bishop defending, but I didn’t see it would turn to attack as soon as you unmasked it. And the check meant I couldn’t just ignore the lousy knight.” Everything was obvious-after the fact. It usually worked that way.

“Uh-huh.” Bryce nodded-a spider encouraging a fly. “Want to play again?” He tried not to look too hopeful.

But Colin shook his head. “Not right now. That one kinda stings.” He leaned back in the dining-room chair. Something in his shoulder crunched. Bryce could sit forever in any position and never get uncomfortable. Colin hadn’t been able to do that even in his twenties. He tried a different tack: “How’s the world treating you these days?”

“Oh, fair to partly cloudy, I guess you’d say,” the younger man answered. “Maybe a skosh better than that. Writing your thesis leaves you hostile. And having a relationship blow up in your face doesn’t exactly make you want to go out and party, either.”

“Tell me about it!” Colin said with more feeling than he’d intended.

Bryce nodded. “Yeah. You know what I’m talking about, all right. So I ought to be down in the Dumpster, right?”

“Hadn’t heard anybody put it like that before, but it seems like a possibility,” Colin said. “You aren’t, though?”

“I aren’t,” Bryce agreed. “I had another poem accepted by a pretty good journal. Theocritus updated, you might say.”

Theocritus was one of the 2,000-plus-years-dead poets he studied. Colin knew that much, and not a nickel’s worth more. Still, he brought his hands together in one silent clap. “Not bad,” he said. “That’s two in a few months.”

As soon as the words came out of his mouth, he wondered if he should have left them in there. Bryce had got the first acceptance just before Vanessa threw him out. Cause and effect? Jealousy? Vanessa made a hell of an editor. She had all the tools she needed to be a writer herself except the nerve. She would rather submit to a root canal without Novocain than to an editor.

Bryce said “Uh-huh” again. He owned a pretty fair poker face. Colin couldn’t tell what he was thinking. That might have been just as well.

“They pay you anything for this one?” Colin asked.

Now Bryce snorted: derision for a silly question. “Copies.” By the way he said it, he figured he was lucky not to have to buy them. “My mom will be happy-she’ll have something to put on her shelf and show my aunts and uncles. But you can’t make a living as a poet. Or I sure as hell can’t, anyway, not with the kinds of things I write. So I do ’em as well as I can, for me. If anybody else likes ’em, cool. If nobody does, I can live with that.”

Colin wondered whether he was kidding himself or knew he was blowing smoke. You didn’t sit down and write poems if you didn’t want other people to see them. You probably wanted to end up on the New York Times bestseller list. Bryce was right about one thing, though: if you modeled your poems on ones from some ancient Greek, you damn well wouldn’t.

“Other thing is…” Bryce hesitated, perhaps almost as carefully as he would have while building and polishing one of his poems. He usually wasn’t shy about telling Colin what was on his mind. Which meant… No sooner had Colin realized what it meant than Bryce confirmed it: “I’ve met somebody I like. She seems to like me, too. We’ll see where it goes, that’s all.”

“Good for you!” Colin was glad he could say it quickly. He didn’t want Bryce thinking he liked him only because he’d been attached to Vanessa. “So have I-but you’ve heard about that.”

“Right.” Bryce raised an eyebrow. “We’ll all run for the hills when the super-duper volcano pops its cork.” Said in a different tone of voice, that would have made Colin want to punch him in the snoot. As things were, and accompanied by a disarming grin, it wasn’t so bad.

“Something’s gonna happen there. I don’t know what. I don’t know when. Neither does anybody else, including Kelly,” Colin said. “Nobody knows when the Big One’ll hit, either. I’ve got an earthquake kit in the steel shed out back, though, and a little one in my trunk. Don’t you?”

“I have one in the car. Harder to put one in the shed when you’re in an apartment,” Bryce said.

“Could be,” Colin admitted. “So who’s your new friend? What’s she do? How’d you meet her?”

“Her name’s Susan Ruppelt. She was moving into the TA office I was clearing out of. We got to talking, and I got her e-mail, and one thing kind of led to another. She’s working on the Holy Roman Empire. Tenth-century stuff, maybe eleventh-.”

“AD, you mean, not BC.”

“That’s right.”

“Too modern for you, then.”

“Hey, what are thirteen hundred years between friends?” Bryce grinned again. He looked as happy as a cat lapping up cream. He hadn’t looked that way while he was with Vanessa, not after the first few months. Maybe it would last longer this time. Or maybe not. Even if it did, things might fall apart years later. Colin had learned more on that score than he’d ever wanted to find out.

“Luck,” he said, and meant it.

“Thanks. You, too.” Bryce’s mouth twisted. “It’s as much as you can hope for, isn’t it? Luck, I mean. You grow together, or else you grow apart. I think Susan’s on the sheltered side, you know? Otherwise, she’d have more sense than to mess with a guy on the rebound.”

“Well, bring her by here one day,” Colin said. “If I can’t scare her away from you, nothing will.”

“I may take you up on that,” Bryce said. “You have been warned.”