Supervolcano: Things Fall Apart

XI

Vanessa Ferguson had a way of walking around with a chip on her shoulder. To her, there was rarely any such thing as a slight. If something was big enough for her to notice, it was big enough to send her off to war, flags flying and bugles blaring.

Being as she was, she fired the first shot more often than not. And so she had even more trouble than most people might have in getting over the Pearl Harbor that Bronislav Nedic had dropped into her life.

She’d loved him. She’d trusted him. She’d opened the postern gate in the fortress of her self and let him inside. She hadn’t just let him inside—she’d led him inside.

She’d let him inside her body, and she’d let him inside her heart. He’d screwed her and he’d screwed her, respectively. He’d taken what he wanted and he’d bailed out. Vanessa had disposed of a string of boyfriends. Now it was her turn.

It damaged her all kinds of ways. Her bank account, for instance. B of A admitted she hadn’t made the withdrawals that drained her savings. But it said they were her fault; she’d given Bronislav access to her personal information. That she didn’t know she’d done it till too late was no excuse. The bank’s fugheadedness held just enough truth to infuriate her all the more.

And now there he was in Mobile, sitting pretty in the restaurant he’d always talked about. He’d cared more for the restaurant than for her. No doubt he figured he could always find another woman. With those Nicolas Cage-y looks and those big, sad eyes, no doubt he could, too. But a restaurant, now, a restaurant didn’t come along every day.

A restaurant didn’t go away every day, either. Not even her father the famous cop had been able to make the Mobile police get off their sorry, lazy asses and bust Bronislav. He was making money in their town. Such birds were so rare these days, they didn’t want to pluck this one.

Her dad hadn’t passed on Gabe Sanchez’s crack about the package bomb. He hadn’t needed to. Vanessa thought of it on her own. The only thing that held her back was a healthy fear of getting caught.

Messing up Bronislav’s life with computer skullduggery, the way he’d messed up hers, also crossed her mind. But she didn’t know any of his passwords. Even if she had, she lacked the computer fu to do anything with them.

Which didn’t mean she didn’t know people who had such arcane talents. Several of them infested Nick Gorczany’s widget works, starting with the big boss himself. Vanessa disliked him too much even to think of approaching him about it.

Some of the other engineers and programmers, though… She spoke, in a hypothetical way, to Bruce McRaa. No, the HTML whiz couldn’t navigate an English sentence with a gun, a camera, and a road atlas. But put him in front of a monitor and all of a sudden he knew what he was doing.

No matter how hypothetically Vanessa talked at lunch one day, he knew what she had in mind, too. Maybe he wasn’t as naïve as he looked. Well, he couldn’t be, not if he wanted to stay alive. “That’s interesting,” he said when she got done. “Illegal, of course, but interesting.”

“That asshole didn’t care about what was legal when he shafted me,” Vanessa said savagely.

“That was his choice, not mine,” Bruce replied. “He must have thought the reward was worth the risk. What kind of reward would we be talking about here?”

Vanessa remembered a bumper sticker she’d seen on a truck bumper—not Bronislav’s. GAS, GRASS, OR ASS—NOBODY RIDES FOR FREE, that was what it said. She remembered TANSTAAFL, too: the annoying libertarian acronym and mantra. There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch. She had no idea whether the enchanter Bruce was a libertarian, though a disturbing number of guys who did things with and to computers seemed to be. Whether he was or not, he understood quid pro quo just fine.

“How much do you want?” Vanessa asked. “If you think I’ll pay you as much as he stole, forget about it. I don’t just want revenge. I want to get back what’s mine, if I can.”

“Oh-kay.” Bruce blew a speck—probably dandruff—off his glasses. “Well, there’s money and then there are other things,” he said at last.

She looked at him. That she thought about it, at least for a second, said she wasn’t the person who’d moved to Denver not long before the supervolcano erupted. But she didn’t think about it much longer than a second. She remembered too well how much she’d hated herself and the whole goddamn world every time she blew that stinking FEMA dweeb in exchange for services rendered. If she had a choice between stringing up Micah Husak and Bronislav, she would choose the FEMA dweeb every time. Bronislav stole her money, yeah. Micah had robbed her of her self-respect.

“Let’s just forget about it, then,” she told the enchanter Bruce.

He looked disappointed. What really pissed her off was, he looked surprised. “I thought you wanted this bad,” he said.

“Badly.” The correction came almost without conscious thought, as it would have were she editing him on paper. She went on, “Anything that went on between us, that would be bad.”

“I don’t think so.” Lewd imaginings filled Bruce’s voice.

Vanessa sighed. “Of course you don’t. It’s always good for guys. But letting somebody screw me to get even with somebody for screwing me… That still leaves me screwed, if you know what I mean.”

If it could make a computer or a tablet or a smartphone jump through hoops, Bruce understood it the way Theocritus understood Doric dialect (that Theocritus had used the Doric dialect was one of the useless factoids she remembered from her time with Bryce). If it had to do with human beings and the way they worked, the HTML wizard was a clueless git.

One of the field marks of a clueless git was that he was clueless about being a git. The enchanter Bruce proved he belonged: “You might like me better after you get to know me that way.”

“If you’re the kind of guy who expects to get his dick wet in exchange for doing something for a woman, nobody in her right mind is gonna like you.” Vanessa spelled it out as plainly as she could: plainly enough to make Bruce McRaa turn pink. Even Micah Husak hadn’t been that dumb. In fact, the FEMA dweeb had got off on having her go down on him when she couldn’t stand him.

“Well, excuse me for breathing,” Bruce said, as snarkily as he could.

“Since we won’t be doing anything for—or to—each other, I suppose I will,” Vanessa answered. “If we were… If we were, you’d want to worry about whether you kept on doing it.”

He started to laugh. Almost as soon as he did, he realized she wasn’t kidding, not even a little bit. The laugh came out as a strangled snort and quickly cut off.

That left her with better feelings about herself than she’d had in Camp Constitution. But it also left her without payback on Bronislav Nedic. If men weren’t such rotten horndogs… It wasn’t as if she hadn’t been plenty hot for Bronislav while they were together. The bastard knew what he was doing in bed, damn him. Which didn’t mean he wasn’t a bastard. It only defined what kind of bastard he was: a fucking bastard, of course.

Not too long after they got back to the widget works, Nick Gorczany called Vanessa into his office. He steepled his fingers and looked at her over them. “Did you ask Bruce to do something that might be illegal?” he inquired.

Bruce, Vanessa presumed, had been in there ahead of her, telling tales. “Who, me?” she said, doing her best to project innocence. “Of course not, Mr. Gorczany. Asking anyone to do something illegal would be, well, illegal.”

“Right,” Gorczany said tightly. Maybe her innocence projector had a burnt-out bulb. He went on, “Bruce went into some detail.”

“Did he?” Vanessa said. Her boss nodded. She continued, “Was one of the details he went into that he said he’d do it if I put out for him?”

“Mm, no,” Nick Gorczany answered. “You told him no dice?”

“You bet your sweet ass I told him no dice,” Vanessa said. “Yeah, I want to get even with Bronislav. But I don’t want to be even with Bronislav and then spend all my time figuring out how to get even with Bruce.”

“Oh.” Gorczany thought that over. After a few seconds, he nodded. “I think that’s a good plan. I also think Bruce may not know how lucky he is not to get all the way on your bad side.”

“Why, Mr. Gorczany, sir! You say the sweetest things!” Vanessa batted her eyelashes at him.

She made him laugh. “Okay. We’ll leave it there, then,” he said between chuckles. But he got serious again in a hurry. “Do me a favor, please. If you want to get even with this guy, that’s your business. Can’t say I blame you, either. If you use people who work here to help you get even, though, and especially if you get them to do things for you that are against the law… In that case, it turns into my business. So don’t do that any more, all right?”

“All right,” Vanessa said reluctantly. It wasn’t, not so far as she was concerned, but she could see where Gorczany was coming from. If one of his employees got into trouble for doing something like that, the widget works could wind up in trouble, too.

She walked out of the boss man’s office. A few minutes later, the enchanter Bruce walked back in. When he emerged once more, he seemed unhappy with the world. Catching Vanessa’s eye, he sent her a dirty look. Her answering stony stare made him find a new direction for his gaze in a hurry.

That would have been funny had Vanessa been in any mood for jokes. She wasn’t, and making Bruce flinch was no more reason for pride than scaring some other puppy. Damn his big, stupid mouth to hell and gone anyway! Because he’d tattled to Nick Gorczany, she couldn’t recruit anyone else at the widget works to give Bronislav what he deserved (and a little more besides—anything worth doing was worth overdoing, wasn’t it?).

Life wasn’t fair sometimes. Life sucked, when you got right down to it. And so did all the alternatives.

One of the amazing things about kids, Kelly Ferguson was discovering, was how fast they changed. Deborah was rolling over. She was crawling. She started to talk, and to walk. All of a sudden, she was potty-trained. Kelly definitely approved of that. So did Colin. “Looks like she’ll turn out to be a human being after all,” he exulted.

Kelly looked at him. “And how long have people been saying the same thing about you?” she asked in her mildest tones.

Her husband didn’t so much as blink. “Hey, babe, I’m a cop. Cops don’t even come close to human beings. Ask anybody. Heck, even the stupid cat knows that.”

The stupid cat in question lay asleep on the rug in front of him. The cat’s name was Playboy, in celebration of Marshall’s best sale. In spite of his name, he’d been fixed. One of the secretaries at the station had been sure her cat was fixed, too, regardless of the attention all the male felines in the neighborhood gave it. Four kittens later, she discovered she was wrong. Colin brought Playboy home with the idea that Deborah would like him.

Deborah did. She loved him, in fact. She squealed and chased him and rubbed his fur the wrong way when she petted him. Playboy was fine with grownups. Whenever Deborah showed up on his radar, he ran like hell.

He was a handsome beast, a gray tabby with an enormous plumy tail. Even the vet thought his tail was impressive, and the vet had seen and traumatized whole regiments of kitties. Unfortunately, while standing in the line for tail twice, Playboy had forgotten about the line for brains.

Colin leaned down to pet the cat. Playboy purred and stretched and rolled over so his belly fur stuck up in the air. He wasn’t a lap cat, but he was friendly enough… on his own terms, and always provided you didn’t shriek “Kitty!” in his ear when he wasn’t expecting it.

“Remember when he met the mirror monster?” Colin said, chuckling.

Kelly snorted. “I’m not likely to forget it. Oh, my God!”

Playboy’d been a kitten then, and brand-new to the house. He’d staggered up the stairs and wandered into Colin’s study. The study had begun life as a bedroom. It boasted sliding, mirrored closet doors, like the other upstairs bedrooms. Playboy, then, spotted another cat in the mirror.

The kitty in the mirror saw him, too. Playboy had thought he was the only cat in the house. He angrily arched his back. So did the kitty in the mirror. He stuck his majestic tail straight up in the air and bottlebrushed it. The kitty in the mirror did, too. Playboy hissed and showed off his pointy teeth. The kitty in the mirror did the same thing.

Provoked past standing it, Playboy charged. The kitty in the mirror charged, too. They slammed together at top speed. Bang! The kitty in the mirror turned out to have a much harder head than Playboy did. And Colin and Kelly, who’d watched the confrontation with wonder and amazement, rolled on the floor laughing their asses off and scared the cat.

“He only did that once,” Kelly said: the best defense of Playboy’s poor battered brain cells she could give.

“I should hope so!” Colin exclaimed. “If he’d done it twice, he would’ve killed himself.”

Deborah came into the front room. Playboy rolled over onto his stomach again and got his feet under him, ready to light out for the tall timber if the small, noisy human launched a sneak attack. But Deborah didn’t have killing cats on her mind right this minute. She was clutching a piece of paper, on which she’d been coloring in crayon.

“Look!” she said importantly, and displayed her artwork: a large blue blob.

“That’s very nice,” Kelly said, and then, “What is it?” With preschoolers, as with adult abstractionists, you were allowed, even encouraged, to ask such questions.

“It’s a whale,” Deborah answered.

“That is nice,” Colin said. He’d picked up a whole series of children’s nature guides on the cheap somewhere. Deborah loved them—she had some of them practically memorized. So if he felt chuffed just then, Kelly wouldn’t have said he hadn’t earned the right.

Deborah, though, hadn’t finished. “It’s a sperm whale,” she explained. “But it’s not done yet. I have to finish coloring in its sperm.”

Kelly looked at Colin. Colin looked at her. They both fought the losing battle as long as they could—say, for a second and a half. Then they lost it even harder than they had when Playboy tried to assassinate the kitty lurking in the mirror. Playboy couldn’t tell whether they were laughing at him this time. He decided not to take any chances and skulked away, his belly low to the rug.

Having lost it, Kelly and Colin couldn’t get it back. They laughed and laughed and laughed some more. Deborah decided it must be funny whether she knew why or not, so she started laughing, too.

Marshall clumped down the stairs to find out what the devil the commotion was about. He scowled with a young man’s stern severity at his ruined father and stepmother. “Some people!” he said. “You see what happens when you get into the dope with the weedkiller sprayed on it?”

“Is that what did it?” Kelly said when she could speak again—which took a while. “Oh, Jesus! I hurt myself.”

“Me, too.” Colin was holding his sides. Kelly’d never seen anyone actually do that before, but she also felt like trying it. He went on as if giving God a takeout order: “I want some new ribs, please. I went and ruined this set.”

“They’re silly!” Deborah informed her half-brother.

“Thanks for letting me know, kid. I never would’ve figured it out without you,” he said. Warily, as the cat might have, he eyed his elders. “What did happen there? Whatever it is, it knocked my train of thought right off the rails.”

Also warily, afraid of a new spasm, Kelly told him what. She and Colin got through the rerun with no more than a few extra giggles, but Marshall laughed almost as hard as they had. Playboy, who’d wondered if it might be safe to come back, turned tail and fled again.

“Wow! Oh, wow!” Marshall said when he got done cracking up. “Have to steal that some way. You couldn’t make it up.”

“That’s why we keep cats and kids around,” Colin said. “For their entertainment value.” He eyed his younger son. “You were pretty darn funny once upon a time your own self. Shame it wore off.”

“Did Grandpa think you were funny?” Marshall asked.

“He thought I was so funny, he walloped me with a belt,” Colin replied. “I gave him a standing O after that, ’cause I sure couldn’t sit down.”

“Mm.” Marshall sounded thoughtful now. “You never did that with us, did you?”

“Nope. Playing too rough, way it looks to me. A whack on the fanny is a different story. Sometimes you can’t make a kid pay attention any other way,” Colin said.

“Says you.” Kelly still wasn’t convinced, but she was less unconvinced than she had been before Deborah was born. Till she saw for herself, she’d had no idea how nutso little kids could drive you and how well they ignored anything resembling logic or common sense.

One of the reasons you swatted a little kid on the fanny, of course, was to make yourself feel better. Before she’d had her own, she would have dismissed that as a rotten reason. She still did, but less scornfully than she would have back in the days BC (Before Children, natch).

Playboy made another cautious approach. Since the grownups weren’t making loud, alarming noises, and since Deborah didn’t seem to want to ruffle his fur or yank his tail, he rolled himself back into a donut on the rug. Tail over his nose, he fell asleep. Kelly wished she could turn herself off so fast. Even tired from teaching and from riding herd on Deborah, she didn’t have the knack.

The next Tuesday—a day she didn’t have to teach at CSUDH—she walked out to get the mail after the mailwoman pedaled past: a grownup trike had replaced the old delivery van. There was a water bill, what looked like a rejection for Marshall, a flyer announcing a hardware sale, and a postcard.

The postcard was black and white. It showed a mill on a river, with New Englandy–looking houses and pines in the background. When she turned it over, the printed legend read View of Guilford, Maine. The note (which, by the postmark, had taken upwards of three weeks to cross the country) was in Rob’s spiky handwriting.

Hi Dad and other sordid family, he wrote. Maybe he meant assorted. Then again, from what Kelly had heard about him, maybe he didn’t. This will let you know that Lindsey is pregnant. So our kid will have a half-aunt (thorax or abdomen?) just a skosh older than he or she is. Pretty weird, especially if they get to meet one of these years. Hope you’re all flourishing. His scrawled signature followed.

She’d never met Rob. Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles hadn’t come through L.A. after she started hanging out with Colin. She was happy for him and his wife anyway. Babies were good things.

She carried in the mail. Marshall said something foul when he saw the SASE. “I’ve got good news, too,” Kelly said.

“Yeah? Like what?”

“You’re gonna be an uncle. And Deborah will be an aunt—or a half-aunt, depending on how you look at things.” She held out the postcard.

Marshall took it. “So this is what Guilford looks like. Or what it looked like whenever they snapped that photo.” He read his brother’s note, then nodded. “Okay, you’re right. That is good news.”

“Uh-huh. I’m going to call your dad if I can,” Kelly said. Power was out, which meant the cell towers were out, which meant her cell phone was a chunk of plastic and semiconductors: useful as a paperweight, but not for talking with people. Sometimes, though—not always—landlines worked when cells didn’t. They were on a different grid, or something.

She got a dial tone when she picked up the handset. “Colin Ferguson,” said the voice on the other end of the line, and then, when he saw which number had called him, “What’s up?”

“We just got a card from Rob. He and Lindsey are going to have a baby.”

“So I’ll be a grandfather, huh?”

“That’s right. How does it make you feel?”

“Officially obsolete instead of just obsolescent,” he said. Kelly laughed—not so hard as she had about Playboy or the sperm whale, but she did. Colin always sounded like Colin. It was… she supposed… one of the things she loved about him.

Louise Ferguson flipped through James Henry’s first-grade reader and spelling book. Her mouth tightened down to a thin, hard line. You couldn’t expect little kids to read Shakespeare or Thoreau. You couldn’t expect them to spell words like unconstitutional or dystrophy, either. She understood that.

But…

Maybe her memory was playing tricks on her. People always thought they’d walked uphill both ways when they went to school, and that they’d had to shovel through snowdrifts taller than they were—this, even if they’d lived in Laguna Beach. Louise understood that, too. It was part of the recipe that cooked up old farts.

Again, but…

The little stories in the reader sure seemed dumber than the ones Rob and Vanessa and Marshall had had. And, back in the day, those had seemed dumber than the ones she recalled from her own childhood. The vocabulary was tiny. The writing was bad: clunky bad. It wasn’t interesting; it didn’t make you go on and see what happened next. They weren’t stories you’d read because you wanted to, not even if you were only six years old. The only way you’d read them was if you had to. Even the illos were hackwork.

And every story preached. Louise wasn’t racist. She wasn’t likely to have had a kid by a Mexican-American if she were. She had nothing against gays, lesbians, bisexuals, or transgendered people. Celebrating diversity was one thing. Singing hosannas about it over and over and over one more time was something else again. It was boring, was what it was.

Yes, education was propaganda. You taught kids the values you wanted them to have, then hoped like hell those values would stick when they got bigger. But did you have to use such a big trowel and lay them on so thick? This stuff was as bad as what the schoolmasters who taught about the dictatorship of the proletariat or that the Führer was always right had used.

If she complained about it to James Henry’s teacher, what would happen? The books wouldn’t change. The Los Angeles Unified School District had its commandments, and one of them was These materials shalt thou use, and no others. And Ms. Calderon would decide she was a reactionary, maybe a dangerous one.

Ms. Calderon already had her suspicions. James Henry could read even when he started kindergarten, for one thing. All by itself, that made teachers and administrators suspect Louise of being an elitist parent. What else could she be, when she’d already done some of what they got paid to do?

She made a small, discontented noise. If they did a better job at what they got paid to do… She remembered what had happened in one Orange County school district—just south of L.A.—before the eruption. The staff there, in its infinite wisdom, had decided that the whole alphabet was too hard for kids in kindergarten to learn. So they’d left out four or five of the less common letters, figuring those would keep till the first grade.

When news of this educational innovation leaked out, everyone who heard about it screamed bloody murder. The district backtracked as fast as it could—it didn’t believe there was no such thing as bad publicity. But, as far as Louise knew, none of the educators who’d had the brainstorm got fired. Thanks to tenure rules, even sexual predators could be hard to can.

She made that noise over again as she paged through the speller. Her dog could spell most of these words, and she didn’t even have a dog.

She knew what the problem was. L.A. Unified wasn’t geared for kids like James Henry. He came from a middle-class background, and his first language was English. That made him stand out from the rest of the herd like a zebra with polka dots. L.A. Unified was about turning immigrants and immigrants’ children into citizens. It didn’t do that any too well, either, but at least it tried.

Private school? Catholic school? Louise was about as Catholic as a petunia, but even so… . Even so, what? she wondered. No matter how much she wanted to send James Henry somewhere better than the local public school, she couldn’t afford to. The public school was free. The others wanted—insisted on—cash on the barrelhead.

You get what you pay for. That was one of the oldest and saddest truths in the world. If you could cough up the money and escape from LAUSD, you got your kid a halfway decent education. If you couldn’t, Junior was stuck with this brain-dead pap instead. Good luck forty years down the line, too. He or she would be washing dishes or standing behind a cash register, waiting on the successful people whose folks had had the jack to buy them a head start.

She knew she’d left homeschooling out of the mix. Homeschooling was cheap, as those things went. It was also aggressively practical for a single mother, wasn’t it? “Yeah, right,” Louise muttered. You could stay home and teach your kid every single thing you wanted him to know. Sure you could—as long as somebody else went out to slay the antelopes and put antelopeburgers on the table.

James Henry wandered into the bedroom. “How come you’re looking at my books, Mommy?” he asked. “Don’t you already know that stuff?”

“Yeah. I do,” Louise answered. “The trouble is, so do you.”

“It’s okay. The work is easy.” James Henry might still be pretty new to this whole school thing, but he’d already figured out that skating through it meant he had more time to do stuff he actually liked. He wasn’t a dummy, not even slightly.

“It’s not okay. You should be doing more,” Louise said. “You know you can do work that’s harder than this.”

“I will.” James Henry wasn’t worried about anything, which was why being a first-grader was so nice. “When they give it to me, I will.”

Louise sighed. “I know. But will that be soon enough?” She imagined him learning the multiplication table just in time to graduate from high school. That wasn’t fair; she knew she exaggerated. Without a doubt, they’d teach it to him by the end of his junior year.

When she laughed—it was either laugh or cry—James Henry asked, “What’s funny, Mommy?”

“Your school is funny, that’s what,” Louise answered.

“It sure is,” James Henry said. “There’s this one kid—his name is Adrian—and he eats boogers.”

“Thank you so much for sharing,” Louise said dryly. Her older offspring had brought back tales out of school like that, too. Remembering her own days as a first-grader, Louise was sure she’d also been surrounded by little monsters. The kid who’d jumped up and down in a puddle of puke, for instance… When you started remembering things like that, you understood why you forgot so much of your childhood. It was one of the few mercies life doled out.

Disgusting Adrian probably wasn’t hurting anyone but himself. But the horror who’d jumped up and down… What was his name, anyhow? Now she’d go nuts trying to bring it back. But what must his mother’s face have looked like when she saw—and got a whiff of—his shoes? And his pants, too. He would have splashed the stuff all over them. Of course he would.

“Jimmy!” Louise exclaimed.

Her youngest son sent her a quizzical stare. “You never call me that. You get yipes stripes when people call me that.”

Yipes stripes were his name for the frown lines she got when he did things she didn’t like. And he was right—she didn’t like it when people called him that. But… “Jimmy isn’t your name,” she agreed. “James Henry is your name. Jimmy is the name of a boy I went to school with when I was in the first grade.”

“Oh.” James Harvey digested that. “He must be an old man by now, huh?”

“You say the sweetest things, dear,” Louise replied. She wondered what had happened to Jimmy. Was he the one who’d joined the Marines as soon as he got out of high school? She thought so, but she wasn’t sure. The only thing she was sure she remembered him for was that one morning at recess.

How come they hadn’t called him Old Pukey Shoes or something else just as elegant all the way through the rest of school? If he’d joined the Marines, maybe he hadn’t been anybody you’d want to mess with even when he was a lot smaller. She didn’t remember that one way or the other. Girls mostly didn’t have to worry about whether boys would knock their block off. Mostly.

“Do you guys ever have fights on the playground?” she asked.

“You get in trouble for that,” James Henry said.

Louise needed a moment to notice it wasn’t what the lawyers called a responsive answer. “Do you ever have any fights?” she asked again.

“I never got caught at one,” James Henry said after a visible pause for thought. Louise decided that would do. What you did mattered to you. Everybody did things he—or she—wasn’t necessarily proud of. What you got caught at mattered to the world. Any number of disgraced politicians and athletes and celebrities could testify to that.

James Henry seemed glad to go do something else then. He must have figured he’d get in trouble for admitting he might have had playground fights. If he’d bragged that he went around starting them, he would have. As things were… Colin had told Rob and then Marshall Don’t throw the first punch, but do your best to make sure you throw the last one. Louise had no use for her ex, but that still seemed a good recipe for not ending up in very many brawls.

It was much too late to worry about what her life would have been like had she not walked out the door on Colin. That didn’t keep her from doing it, of course; plain and obvious truth never kept anybody from doing such things. The answer seemed plain and obvious, too. She’d have more money and fewer nagging little worries than she did now. But she’d also be emotionally dead.

This was better. She kept telling herself so. It could have been really good, if only Teo had wanted the child he’d fathered. If only. My granny could have been a bicycle, too, if only she’d had wheels, Louise thought. She shook her head. Granny would have saved a fortune on gasoline, too. In Granny’s day, though, they hadn’t cared. Well, too bad for them.