Supervolcano: Things Fall Apart

X

Cal State Dominguez Hills wasn’t the most beautiful college campus running around loose. UC Santa Barbara had a much nicer natural setting. UCLA and Berkeley both jumped all over CSUDH when it came to architecture. Dominguez Hills looked more like a nicely landscaped office park than anything else Kelly Ferguson could think of. But Cal State Dominguez Hills had one enormous advantage over all those prettier places. Unlike them, it had given her a job.

She both was and wasn’t glad to be back at the State University. She was because she liked research and teaching. She wasn’t because going back to work took her away from Deborah.

She’d looked down her nose at women who let motherhood slow down their careers… till she had to start making those choices herself. Then, as people often do, she discovered things weren’t so simple as they looked from the outside. She liked research and teaching. She loved her little girl, who changed faster and needed her more than the study of supervolcano eruptions did.

But if she stayed away too long, no one but her would care if she ever came back. So here she was, and there was Marshall, keeping an eye on Deborah back home. Kelly also felt conflicted about Marshall’s progress as a writer. She wanted him to do well. But if he did very well, he could afford to say no instead of babysitting his half-sister.

A Frisbee flew through the air. A dog ran, jumped, caught it, and proudly carried it back to the kid who’d thrown it. Most of the students looked like kids to Kelly—one more sign she wasn’t a kid herself any more.

She made her way to the room where she was privileged, if that was the word, to teach Introduction to Geology: geology for people who weren’t geology majors. Some of them, by all appearances, had barely heard of rocks. There were good students in the Cal State University system, as there were in the University of California system. But there weren’t nearly so many of them.

This lecture was about plate tectonics, and about how continents could slowly move across the surface of the Earth and, sometimes, run into one another. “India used to be a separate continent,” she said. “Then it ran into the bigger Asian land mass. The collision pushed up the Himalayas, the tallest mountains in the world. It’s still pushing them up to this day.”

Some of the students in the room took notes. Some listened without writing anything down. Some, plainly, had their heads a million miles away.

“For a long time, people were sure continents couldn’t move, even though the east coast of South America looks like it fits together with the west coast of Africa, and almost the same with North America and Europe. The first man who proposed the idea of continental drift, a German named Wegener”—Kelly wrote the name on the board—“got called a crackpot for his trouble. That was right after the First World War. It wasn’t till the 1960s that enough evidence came to light to make people take another look at Wegener the weirdo.”

She outlined what the evidence was. Then, smiling as she remembered her own undergraduate days, she went on, “The older profs I studied under were in college themselves when geologists started to realize continental drift and plate tectonics were true after all. One guy told me it hit geology as hard as the idea that the Earth goes around the sun and not the other way around hit astronomy in the days of Copernicus and Galileo.”

After the lecture, a tall student named George Chun—Chinese? Korean?—came up to her. He was one of the bright ones. He would have been a bright one anywhere. Maybe he couldn’t afford to go to a UC school. Kelly couldn’t find any other reason why he’d be here and not at one of them. She hadn’t learned all her students’ names, but she knew his, all right.

“Talk about astronomy,” he said. “I was in one of those courses last quarter. The instructor talked about the Ptolemaic theory. Then he talked about the Copernican theory. And one of the dudes walking out in front of me said to his bud, ‘If that first one wasn’t true, man, why’d he go and teach it to us?’”

Kelly laughed and groaned at the same time. “The really scary thing is, I believe you,” she said.

“Some people are too stupid to live,” Chun said with the heartlessness of nineteen.

“And of course you’ve never said anything or done anything dumb in your whole, entire life. And neither have I.” Kelly waited to see how he’d take that. There were bright kids who really did think being anything less than bright was, or ought to be, a punishable offense.

But Chun laughed. “Well, when you put it like that… Take care.” He turned away from the lectern.

“You, too, George,” Kelly said. “And thanks for the story. That’s a good one—or a bad one, depending on how you look at things.”

The student shrugged. “Kinda weirded me out that there could be guys who need an astronomy class to tell ’em the sun doesn’t revolve around the Earth. But hey, like you say, I bet there’s stuff I don’t know that a lot of people’d call intuitively obvious.”

“We can all say that,” Kelly answered. But her guess was that George Chun’s failings, whatever they might be, weren’t academic. If he was the kind of young man too shy to date much… either he’d get horny enough for his hard-on to push him in that direction or he’d stay social caterpillar and never turn into social butterfly.

She was walking to her office when groans announced that the CSUDH campus had lost power. She slowed down. The office was on the third floor and had no window. With the door open—more important, with the door to the office across the hall (which did have a window) open—it wasn’t quite so dark as the inside of a politician’s head, but it came close.

So, instead of climbing the stairs, she sat down on a concrete ledge near the doorway to the building. Anybody who needed to talk with her would likely spot her there. Anybody who needed to talk with her so much that he or she had sprinted on ahead would, she hoped, take a hint from the locked door and the gloomy hallway, come downstairs and back outside, and then spot her there. Chances were good that even students not rich enough or bright enough to win admission to one of the UC campuses could figure that out.

Sure as hell, another Asian kid buttonholed her. Rex wasn’t doing nearly so well as George Chun. Kelly had a good idea why he wasn’t, too: he was baked all the time. She recognized the signs from Marshall. But Marshall held the joint—he got loaded a lot, but he still functioned. Kelly thought the joint was holding Rex.

He had trouble remembering what he wanted to ask her, which couldn’t be a good sign. Finally, a couple of his fried synapses clicked together and made a spark: “Oh, yeah! Plate, like, tec… waddayacallit.”

“Tectonics,” Kelly said patiently. Stoners could do it. They just couldn’t do it very fast. “What do you need to know?”

Again, he had to grope for an answer. He reminded Kelly of that ancient Cosby routine where the dudes with the munchies went to Burger King and forgot why they were there before they could order. When one of them got asked what he wanted, he mumbled Hey, lemme talk to the king. Rex was too much like that.

At last, he managed, “Um, how’s that work, you know?”

With a small sigh, Kelly explained how it worked. It was an abridged version of what she’d said during the lecture, but it was all new to Rex, even though he’d been there.

“Wow,” he said, and she had to fight back giggles. She hadn’t heard such a wasted noise, even from Marshall, for a long time. Rex went on, “That’s pretty amazing. How’d they psych out it does that?”

Kelly fed him another slice of the lecture. Maybe it would stay down this time. She could hope so.

Another student, a Hispanic woman whose name Kelly couldn’t find in her head, came up when she was halfway through her little talk on subduction and seafloor spreading. Kelly backed and filled so the newcomer wouldn’t think she was speaking Urdu. The woman actually seemed to have some idea of what was going on. Kelly wouldn’t have said the same thing about Rex.

She did feel virtuous that she’d stationed herself out here and drawn some students even though her office wasn’t usable. When her office hours were done, she turned in a journal at the library, collected a handwritten receipt, and trudged off to the bus stop for the trip back to San Atanasio.

It would have been twenty minutes by car. The way things worked these days, it took one transfer and over an hour to get back to her stop on Braxton Bragg Boulevard. From there, she had to walk another ten or fifteen minutes before she was actually home.

As it did so often since the eruption, sunset looked like a pousse-café, with all sorts of gaudy, gorgeous colors piled one atop another and changing every time she looked at them. She didn’t look at them as much as their beauty should have demanded. She’d seen too many sunsets not just like this one, maybe, but every bit as gorgeous.

When her key turned first the dead bolt and then the lock to the front door, she heard high, shrill squeals from inside. As soon as she walked through the front door, a small, friendly hurricane did its goddamnedest to kneecap her. “Mommymommymommymommmy!” the hurricane yelled, all one word.

Kelly let her backpack slide from her shoulders to the floor. She picked up Deborah and squeezed her and kissed her. “Hello, kiddo. I missed you,” she said. “Have you been a good girl?”

“No,” Deborah said proudly.

“Marshall?” Kelly asked, a certain apprehension in her voice.

“Not too bad,” Marshall said. “She was gonna see if a coffee mug bounced like a rubber ball, but I got it away from her before she could make like Isaac Newton and experiment.”

“Good for you,” Kelly said, and then, to her daughter, “Don’t throw cups, please.”

“Why?” Deborah asked, which gave Kelly a sinking feeling.

Hoping against hope, Kelly answered, “Because they can break.”

But she was doomed after all. “Why?” Deborah asked again.

“Because they’re made of china.”

“Why?” Deborah was ready to ask it all night long. And why not? Mommy was home, and the world was wonderful again.

With no great enthusiasm, Colin Ferguson dialed a number in Mobile, Alabama. His opinion of Mobile wasn’t high. His destroyer had put in there for a few days while he was in the Navy. The weather’d been every bit as horrendously hot and sticky as New Orleans’. Unlike New Orleans, though, Mobile seemed to have been settled by people who had no idea how to have fun.

Nowadays, Mobile’s weather was probably better than it had been before the supervolcano eruption. It would be one of the few places in the world able to say that.

But he hadn’t called Mobile to talk about the weather. In due course, a voice on the other end of the line said, “This is Lieutenant Randall Atkins, Theft and Fraud Unit.” Lieutenant Atkins had a deep voice, and a drawl thick enough to slice.

“Morning, Lieutenant. I’m Captain Colin Ferguson, of the San Atanasio PD out in California.”

“Ferguson… San Atanasio…” Colin could just about watch the pieces going round and round in the Mobile cop’s mind like the wheels on a slot machine. Pretty soon, Atkins hit the jackpot. “Jesus! Aren’t you the guy who—?”

“Yeah, I’m the guy who, all right,” Colin agreed heavily. He knew too well he’d be getting that the rest of his career. “This hasn’t got anything to do with that, though.”

“Okay.” Atkins seemed to pull himself together and act professional. “What does it have to do with, then, Captain?”

“There’s a new restaurant in your town, a place called Unity,” Colin said, remembering that Bronislav’s tat with the cross and the two forward C’s and the two backward ones stood for Only unity will save the Serbs. “One of the people behind it is a fellow named Bronislav Nedic.”

“Named what? You want to spell that for me, Captain? Spell it nice and slow, if you’d be so kind.” Colin did—the request was more than reasonable. When he finished, Randall Atkins said, “All right. I’ve got it. You don’t mind my asking though, how come a cop way the devil out in California cares about a guy with a funny name in the restaurant racket here?”

“I don’t mind,” Colin answered. “We’ve got a warrant out on Nedic. Charge is grand theft. He hacked into his girlfriend’s bank account, swiped almost ten grand, and used it to get a piece of this Unity place.” The restaurant already had half a dozen online reviews, all of them good, a couple of them raves. After a brief pause, Colin went on, “I’d go after him any which way—believe me on that one, Lieutenant. But it just so happens that his girlfriend is my daughter.”

“Ouch!” Atkins said. “Boy, what a dumb son of a bitch, ripping off a cop’s kid.”

“That did cross my mind,” Colin said. “But he knew she had it, and he figured out how to get his hands on it, and he was talking about opening a place to eat for as long as he dated Vanessa—a couple-three years. Looks like he could resist everything but temptation.”

“Heh,” Lieutenant Atkins said. He paused for longer than Colin had before continuing, “Well, send us the particulars and we’ll look into it.” He didn’t say they would bust Bronislav Nedic and send him back to California in leg irons. He didn’t say anything of the sort—not even close.

Colin noted what he didn’t say, and didn’t like what he did say. “Look into it?” the San Atanasio cop echoed. If he sounded affronted, he sounded that way because he damn well was.

Randall Atkins just sighed. “’Fraid so, Captain. You need to understand—things aren’t real good around here right now. We’ve got swarms of folks in town who’re just out of the camps, and it’s like they’re cons just out of prison. They don’t give a shit—pardon my French—about anybody but them. Stealing’s second nature to ’em. That and turning tricks are about the only way you can get stuff in those places. They’ll lift anything that isn’t nailed down, and they’ll try and pry up the nails if it is. They’d sooner steal food than work for it, not that there’s much work to get around here.”

“I hear that,” Colin said, remembering Victor Jennings and others like him.

“Yeah, I bet you do,” Lieutenant Atkins said. “But anyway, that’s where we’re at. Somebody’s actually opening up a business instead of closing one, we won’t go after him real hard unless he grabs himself an AK-47 and starts shooting up the neighborhood.”

“He’s liable to,” Colin remarked.

“Say what?”

“I said, he’s liable to. Have you seen this dude, Lieutenant? He’s very bad news. I always figured he’d be more likely to knock over a bank than to rip one off with a laptop. When Yugoslavia came to pieces in the Nineties, he did some nasty things over there. I don’t know all the gory details and I don’t want to, but he did. You can see it in his eyes.”

“And he was going with your daughter?”

“It wasn’t my idea. He’s not any more—that’s for damn sure.” Colin sighed. “She’s old enough to make her own mistakes, and it’s not like she’d listen to me if I tried to show ’em to her. Not obvious she should, either, on account of I sure made my share of mistakes like that.”

Randall Atkins chuckled mirthlessly. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, man—and if you believe that, I’ll tell you another one. But seriously, as long as this, uh, Nedic keeps his nose clean around here, we aren’t gonna go after him real hard. We’ve got enough day-to-day trouble. We don’t sweat the other kind much.”

“What would happen if I asked your switchboard to put me through to the chief there?” Colin asked.

“Go ahead,” Atkins said. “Maybe he’ll do you a cop-to-cop favor. But I’ve got a hundred bucks that says he’ll tell you about what I just did.”

A hundred bucks wasn’t what it had been before the eruption, let alone what it had been when Colin was in the Navy—back in those days, a hundred bucks was serious money. But it still wasn’t nothing. Instead of calling the chief in Mobile, Colin hung up. Atkins had convinced him the Alabama town really didn’t worry about people like Bronislav as long as he stuck to his restaurant there.

“That sucks,” Gabe Sanchez said when Colin told him the sad story over lunch. “Sucks big-time, matter of fact.”

“Tell me about it,” Colin answered. “But I don’t know what I can do. Mobile’s not like the LAPD—I don’t get many chances to do them a bad turn if I owe ’em one.”

“You could mail ’em a package bomb,” Gabe said helpfully. “Make sure you put a long delay on the timer. The post office is as slow as Super Bowl losers in February.”

“Ha!” Colin heard the uneasiness in his voice. He would never do anything like that. But he didn’t plan to pass Gabe’s joke on to Vanessa. He didn’t think she would send Lieutenant Atkins something that went boom! when you opened it. He also didn’t think she would try that kind of payback on Bronislav Nedic. He wasn’t sure enough not to worry about giving her ideas. She was already righteously pissed off at the big, tough Serb.

Colin wished Vanessa were righteously pissed off at herself, too. She’d wasted years of her life on a man who saw her as… what? As a fuck toy and an ATM, that was what. But Vanessa had never blamed herself for anything that happened to her. No, it was always somebody else’s fault, usually a man’s, once in a while her mother’s.

“If the city cops won’t do anything, maybe you can get hold of the Alabama highway patrol or state troopers or whatever the hell they call ’em over there,” Gabe said. “If Bron-whatever’s doing anything bent outside of his fancy new restaurant, they could land on him for you.”

“Huh.” This time, Colin’s grunt was thoughtful. “You know, you may not be as dumb as I look.”

Gabe had opened his mouth to come back with a zinger of his own. He coped with self-mockery without shifting gears: “Jeez, I hope so!”

“Me, too,” Colin said. “I honest to God may put a flea in somebody’s ear about that place. Nedic never struck me as the kind of guy who stayed inside the rules all the time. Hey, he spent a while doing Christ knows what in a place where you made your own rules with an AK. He lived through that. What do you want to bet he thinks he can live through anything?”

“Sounds reasonable.” Gabe nodded. Then he looked sly. “Suppose he did enough of that shit so you could get his ass in a sling on a war-crimes rap?”

“I doubt it. Far as I know, he was just a spear-carrier,” Colin answered. “On the off chance, though, I’ll poke around online.” He didn’t mention that he spoke not a word of Serbo-Croatian. Gabe already knew that. Colin couldn’t even cuss in it, the way Vanessa could. And the Serbian half of the language was written in an alphabet he didn’t read. Details, details…

“Have you told Vanessa the Mobile cops are sitting with their thumbs up their asses?” Sanchez could find the most intriguing questions.

“Not yet.” Colin wasn’t looking forward to that, any more than he would have looked forward to another not-social-enough call on Dr. Stan Birnbaum. Sighing, he went on, “Wish I could get out of it. Won’t happen, though, not when she was the one who found Nedic when he surfaced.”

“She was?” Gabe raised a shaggy eyebrow. “Either she takes after you or she’s been reading too much Sherlock Holmes.”

“Bet on the Holmes,” Colin said dryly. There were ways Vanessa took after him. He didn’t notice all of them. Neither did his daughter: one more way she resembled him.

“You know where this guy is at now, anyway.” Gabe gave what consolation he could. “If he does go bad, the Alabama cops will bust his sorry ass. And if he starts banking profits, well, maybe you can find your own hacker to make ’em disappear.” He grinned.

He could grin—it wasn’t his problem. It wasn’t really Colin’s, either, but Vanessa was his daughter in spite of everything, so he wound up stuck with it. “Yeah,” he said, “maybe I can.” He only wished he believed that. If Bronislav Nedic wasn’t the kind who stashed his cash in a coffee can or between his mattress and box spring, Colin had never seen anybody who was. You didn’t need a hacker for that kind of job. You needed a strong-arm man. And any strong-arm man who bumped into the tattooed Serb might find out his arm wasn’t so strong as he’d figured.

The apartment Rob Ferguson shared with Lindsey Kincaid—after a lot of hemming and hawing, she’d kept her own last name—enjoyed all the modern conveniences. It enjoyed the conveniences that were modern when the nineteenth century segued into the twentieth, anyhow. It had running water… when the pipes didn’t freeze. Some of the time, it had hot running water. The icebox kept food fresh. The stove, which would burn wood or coal depending on how you adjusted the grate, not only cooked food but also did its share in heating the place.

There was even electricity. Sometimes. After a fashion. The Energizer Bunny’s proud products were among the most important goods that trickled into Maine north and west of the Interstate during the short summer season when most of the snow melted off most of the roads and the voice of the eighteen-wheeler was heard in the land.

Batteries powered flashlights and lamps. The most popular ones in these parts used LEDs and drew very little power. That stretched the batteries’ effective lives. Batteries also powered music players. Rob was far from the only person who put miles and miles on a bicycle to nowhere to keep an iPod charged. Listening to music from before the eruption reminded him the wider world was still out there. Listening to a shortwave radio did the same thing.

So did the occasional click from the Geiger counter Dick Barber had found wherever the hell Dick came up with such things. Sometimes, when the wind blew from the northwest, the clicks sounded less occasional. The Russians hadn’t used atomic weapons in their war against Kazakhstan and Ukraine. But Kazakh special forces squadrons—Kazakh terrorists, Radio Moscow called them—had infiltrated into Russia and blown up two nuclear power plants. It wasn’t a new Chernobyl (or if it was, the Russians wouldn’t admit it). It did raise the background radiation level.

It also raised Barber’s amusement level. “Of course the Kazakhs will know where the Russians have security problems,” he said. “Their higher-ups went to the university with the Russians’ higher-ups back in the days when the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic and the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic were both parts of the same workers’ paradise.”

“Er—right,” Rob said. People like Dick Barber and Rob’s father could talk that way with a straight face. They remembered the Cold War from when they were young. And people like Jim Farrell, most of a generation older still, could talk that way and sound as if it were the most important thing in the world. For much of their lives, the Cold War, who would win it, whether anyone could win it, and the terrible fear it would turn hot, had been the most important thing in the world.

“Want some more cider, Dick?” Lindsey asked. She didn’t fancy Barber’s politics, but she did think he was interesting. And he was her husband’s friend. That tipped the scales toward politeness for her.

“Much obliged,” Barber said. Lindsey poured some for him and some for Rob. The cider was also an import from the south, from a land where the growing season stayed long enough for apples. Barley sometimes grew here, so local beer remained possible.

“You’re not drinking any yourself, babe,” Rob said.

“Don’t feel like it,” Lindsey answered. Rob let an eyebrow climb toward his hairline. Lindsey liked cider fine, thank you very much. But something in her voice warned him not to push it right then. It wasn’t something Dick Barber would have noticed. Rob sure did, though. If you were going to make this husband-and-wife business work, you needed to pick up on stuff like that.

After more gloating about the Russians’ embarrassment and distress, Barber went on his way. Rob turned to Lindsey and asked, “How come you didn’t feel like cider?”

“It’s not a good plan when you’re going to have a baby,” she told him.

He got up and hugged her. Even with the potbellied stove in the apartment, it wasn’t warm. They both wore too many layers to make the hug as enjoyable as it might have been.

“That’s wonderful,” Rob said into her ear. He wasn’t altogether caught by surprise. Any tolerably alert husband notices more about his wife than subtle shifts in her tone of voice. He knows how her calendar runs and when she’s due. He also knows when she’s late, even if he doesn’t say anything about it till she brings it up herself.

This time, she squeezed him. “Now we have to decide where we’re going to move after the kid comes out,” she said.

His jaw dropped. “Oh, yeah? I like it here. If you don’t, you sure did a good job on the coverup. Richard Nixon would be proud.” Nixon was even more before his time than the end of the Cold War, but he prided himself on coming out with weird things every now and then.

To his annoyance, Lindsey barely noticed. “I like it here fine—for us,” she said. “But I want my son or daughter to have some possibilities in life. Possibilities that go further than moose hunter or fur trapper or beer brewer or scavenger.”

“Ooh.” Rob’s mouth twisted. That hit close to home, all right—too close. Lives here, including his own, were catch-as-catch-can. He did whatever he could to help put food on the table. Whenever Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles had a gig, he played. He gave guitar lessons. He hunted. He fished. He’d never ice-fished till he came to Maine, but he sure had now. He chopped wood. He swapped this for that and that for the other thing, hoping he came out ahead more often than not.

As a teacher, Lindsey had more order in her life. What she didn’t have was more money. Maine’s state government ignored the great expanse north and west of the Interstate almost as thoroughly as the Feds did. It concentrated its attention on the part of the state that had some small chance of paying bills rather than just running them up.

With the collapse of cash in this stretch of the country, the local school district had given up trying to collect taxes. Families with kids in school helped keep teachers in food and fuel, and did other things they needed. If they couldn’t or wouldn’t, their kids stopped going, as they would have in the nineteenth century. Even Jim Farrell called the system ugly, but it worked most of the time. The locals had taken care of themselves and helped their neighbors before the eruption. They were more used to it than people in some other places would have been.

One of those other places was the Southern California where Rob Ferguson had grown up. He pointed that out to Lindsey, saying, “Are you sure you want to move? People who live here really belong. It’s not like that in most of the country—I mean, totally not like that.”

His wife stuck out her chin and looked stubborn. “Suppose the baby gets sick or gets hurt. Or you do, or I do. We’re living on borrowed time here. People die every year because they run out of it.”

She wasn’t wrong. In the Guilford clinic, Dr. Bhattacharya did what he could with what he had. He didn’t have much, and seemed to have less every year. The closest hospital was in Dover-Foxcroft, more than ten miles east along the Piscataquis. An ambulance did run during the brief summer. A snowmobile or two were kept alive for the rest of the year. But, for anything this side of the worst emergencies, the hospital was at least two hours away. And it hadn’t been much of a hospital before the supervolcano. Like Dr. Bhattacharya here, its staff did what they could. They couldn’t do enough.

“It’s funny,” Rob said. “For years before the band washed up here, I never had a home. Nothing close to a home except maybe our SUVs. We were on the road all the time. We’d play somewhere, overnight in some cheap motel, and then hop in the Explorers and play somewhere else—two states away, half the time. So I wondered if I’d go stir-crazy when we got stuck in Guilford.” He broke into ersatz Dylan: “Oh, Lord, stuck in Guilford/With the SoCal blues again!”

“Oh, Lord!” Lindsey agreed. Rob winced. She went on, “If you didn’t get stuck here, we wouldn’t’ve met.”

“I know. That’s what I’m saying,” Rob answered. “This is a good place even if it’s the boonies—maybe especially because it’s the boonies. Please, Mr. Custer, I don’t wanna go.”

“But we’re on the ragged edge of civilization two or three months a year,” Lindsey said. “The rest of the time, we’ve fallen over the edge.”

“I know,” Rob said. That he admitted it seemed to surprise her. He continued, “Is that a bug or a feature, though? As long as the rest of the world leaves us alone, aren’t we better off?”

“You’ve spent too much time listening to Dick and Jim,” Lindsey said, which wasn’t a charge he could exactly deny. “And what happens when Junior”—she set a hand on her still-flat belly—“turns eighteen? Even assuming there’s something like high school here then and he, she, whatever, graduates from it, what about college?”

The University of Hard Knocks trembled on the tip of Rob’s tongue. He gave the serious effort he needed to keep it from falling off. Despite his love for smartass cracks, he came equipped with enough sense to see that that one would land him in deep, deep kimchi. It might be true, but that made it worse, not better.

Instead, he said, “Hey, the University of Maine at Orono is still a going concern, right? That’s not super far away. It’s—what? Sixty or eighty miles? Something like that. It’d be doable.”

He did make Lindsey stop and think. But she shot back, “How will we pay for tuition? Moose meat?”

If there are any moose left when Junior hits college age, great. One more thing Rob didn’t say. What he did say was, “We’ll work something out. Not like we’re the only ones up here worrying about this kind of stuff.”

“Well… maybe.” His wife still didn’t sound convinced. But she also didn’t sound like someone who wanted to pull up stakes and head for warmer country before dinner. To Rob, that felt like a victory, and not such a small one, either.