Supervolcano: Things Fall Apart

XII

Back in California, Bryce Miller had never paid that much attention to the Weather Channel even after the supervolcano eruption. When he did pause there in his channelsurfing, it was to see what Mother Nature was doing to some other part of the country, not what she had in mind for him and his friends. SoCal led a charmed life.

But he wasn’t in SoCal any more. He was smack dab in the middle of the flyover states. Back in California, he’d used the term with the light irony it deserved… if you came from one of the coasts, anyhow. They used it here, too—bitterly, angrily, hopelessly. This was the part of the country the parts of the country that made (and that spun) the news ignored. Roman citizens of the second century A.D. who lived in Spain or Pannonia or Cappadocia would have said provincial the same hangdog way American citizens who lived in Nebraska said flyover states.

And, in this part of the country, the Weather Channel had the urgency of a kick in the teeth. That had been true even before the eruption. It was truer now. Satchel Paige famously said Don’t look back. Something might be gaining on you. Around here, you did need to look ahead, to see what was rolling down on you.

This particular Weather Channel talking head was a very pretty Asian woman. She was pretty enough to make Susan notice. “You don’t mind the blizzards so much when she tells you about them?” she suggested.

“I could have the mute button on, and I wouldn’t mind,” Bryce answered. Susan gave him a dirty look. He winked at her. That helped, a little.

He discovered he didn’t want the mute button on after all. The pretty weathercaster was saying, “The upper Midwest needs to brace itself for the arrival of the Siberian Express. This enormous cold front was born near the North Pole and has been rolling south like a freight train. It has already severely impacted Canada.”

Bryce made a face at the bureaucratic language. He started to say something rude about it, but Susan shushed him.

Just as well, too. The talking head went on, “Edmonton’s low night before last was minus sixty-eight. Saskatoon’s high yesterday—the high, mind you—was minus thirty-one. The storm reached Winnipeg last night. The low there was minus fifty-six.”

A screen behind her showed a handful of people bundled up like Eskimos trying to make their way through swirling white. It was labeled EDMONTON, but it could have been any place up to and including the last frozen circle of hell, the one where Dante stuck Satan. Americans were preoccupied with their own misery. The eruption itself had hurt the USA worse than Canada. The disrupted weather was doing a nastier number on the neighbor to the north.

Even back in pre-eruption days, ninety percent of the people in Canada had lived within a hundred miles of the American border. That was where the climate had been sortakinda decent: like northern Minnesota, say, only a little rougher. A little rougher than northern Minnesota now, though, was on the ragged edge of human habitability. Or, judging by that footage, maybe over it.

“This is a big storm—a big, rugged storm. Even by post-eruption standards, this storm is very bad news,” the weathercaster said seriously. “Lots of snow, strong winds, and frigid temperatures mean you should not go out in it unless you absolutely have to. And if you think you have to, think again. Staying inside may save your life.”

Susan eyed the progression of the front on the CG map. It was just roaring over the border now. That put it about a day from Wayne. Maybe a little more, but you couldn’t count on that.

“Don’t go in to class tomorrow,” she said. “You’d probably get there okay, but I don’t know about coming back to town. What I do know is, I’m afraid you’d be dumb enough to try.”

“Hey!” Bryce sounded indignant, which he was. “I don’t do anything the people around here don’t do.”

“Yeah, well, even the people from around here aren’t used to a blizzard like this,” Susan answered. “Stay here. Stay… as warm as you can, anyhow.” She couldn’t say stay warm, because the apartment wasn’t warm. But it was warmer than the outside would be, anyhow. How cold could it get here with the Siberian Express howling down? Colder than Bryce wanted to find out about, that was for sure.

He went to the Wayne State Web site. On the home page, an announcement in big red letters said DUE TO THE WEATHER EMERGENCY, CLASSES WILL NOT BE HELD FOR THE NEXT TWO DAYS. A DECISION ON REOPENING WILL BE MADE AT THAT POINT IN TIME. THANK YOU.

Susan read it over his shoulder. “There,” she said, a certain I-told-you-so in her voice. “Now you can stay home without guilt.” Since guilt was exactly what Bryce would have felt for ditching his class without official approval, he maintained a prudent silence.

Al Stewart sang a song called “Coldest Winter” about, among other things, the winter of 1709. Along with the guys in Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles, Al Stewart was one of the few pop musicians with a sense of history, or even a sense that there was such a thing as history. No surprise that a classicist and ancient historian like Bryce had a lot of him on his iPod.

When the Siberian Express blew into and blew through Wayne and did its goddamnedest to blow the town over, Bryce decided that 1709 no longer came within miles of being the coldest winter in memory. Topping it might have taken more than three centuries, but this winter of the world’s discontent froze every earlier competitor in its tracks.

The wind howled. It screamed. It wailed. The apartment had double-paned windows with shades, venetian blinds, and thick curtains. Cold seeped through them anyhow. Susan had a stuffed cat with a long, fat tail filled with sand that she used to keep chilly outside air from sliding in under the bottom of the door. That was fine, but how did you keep the chilly air from sliding past all the other cracks between the door and its frame?

For that matter, how did you keep cold from sliding in through the door, and through the walls? Yes, the walls were insulated, too. When the Siberian Express came to town, the insulation was fighting as far out of its weight as a flyweight forced into the ring against Mike Tyson.

Bryce had always been glad the apartment was on the second floor, not the first. When you had neighbors above you, you often wondered if a herd of shoes was migrating right over your head. Stereo sound you didn’t want was another delight when it came through the ceiling.

That much, he’d known as long as he’d been apartment-hunting. But what he hadn’t worried about till he got to Wayne was that heat rose. When the people down below tried to heat their place to the fifty degrees allowed by law, some of what their sorry heater pumped out also did its feeble best to warm this apartment. That feeble best might not be very good, but anything was better than nothing.

Against the Siberian Express, anything wasn’t nearly enough better than nothing. After a while, Bryce and Susan spread all the blankets they had on top of the bed. They got in, fully clothed, and wrapped their arms around each other.

“I’m still cold,” Susan said.

“So am I.” Bryce nodded. “Well, if they find us frozen, we’ll be one lump of ice, not two.” He squeezed her tighter.

“You say the sweetest things,” she murmured. For some reason, Bryce suspected her of imperfect sincerity.

He couldn’t stay wrapped up with her all the time, not unless his bladder froze solid. When he flushed the toilet, he hoped it would work. They insulated pipes here, but not against weather like this. Sooner or later, those would start freezing up.

On his way back to bed, he pulled back the curtains and the blinds and the shade so he could look out the window. He saw a tone poem Whistler would have been proud of. White snow fell from a gray sky onto white drifts. The drifts might not have been as high as an elephant’s eye, but they were gaining on it.

“What do you see?” Susan asked. She was too sensible to come out from under the covers herself unless she had to.

“Outside of a couple of woolly mammoths, just snow.” Bryce adapted a line from Groucho Marx: “Inside the woolly mammoths, it’s too dark to tell.”

“Ba-dum-bum! Rimshot!” Susan said, and then, “Invite the poor things in for coffee. I’ll bet they’re freezing out there.”

“Wouldn’t be surprised.” Bryce got back into the bed. As he chastely snuggled with his wife, he said, “Remind me again why I wanted to move to Nebraska.”

“It’s called a job.” Susan pronounced the last word yob, as if it were some strange foreign term, possibly borrowed from the German. “They give you money for it.” That came out as moh-nee, as if it also didn’t belong in English.

“Oh, yeah.” Bryce nodded as if he’d forgotten. He wished he had.

After a while, bored by doing nothing under the covers, he started to do something. Susan slapped his roving hands away. “If you think I’m going to take my clothes off for you, Buster, you’re out of your ever-lovin’ mind!”

“You don’t have to take ’em off,” Bryce said—reasonably, he thought. “Just slide some of ’em down a little. Hey, what else have you got to do right now?”

“Now there’s a come-on line,” Susan muttered. But she rolled over so her back was to him. With a minimum of disrobing, the deed was done. Fornication with next to no bare skin wasn’t nearly so much fun as fornication with lots of bare skin. It was a hell of a lot better than no fornication at all, though.

Bryce thought so, anyhow. “See?” he said, setting a hand on her bare hip. “We’re warmer now.”

“Oh, boy.” Susan quickly made sure that hip wasn’t bare any more. Then she rolled over to face him again and gave him a kiss. “You’re crazy. I love you. I must, or else I’d be crazy, too.”

They got out of bed to use the john, to eat, to make hot coffee for themselves if not for the woolly mammoths, and to check the Weather Channel and CNN for views of what the Siberian Express was doing to the Midwest beyond their frozen apartment and frozen Wayne. By then, the storm had got down to St. Louis, which didn’t even come close to being built for blizzards like that. It was heading for Memphis and New Orleans. They were even less ready. Ready or not, here it came.

For Marshall Ferguson, the Siberian Express was a noise in another room. When the house had power, he saw a lot of white on white on the TV. Newscasters gave forth with the number of people found frozen. It was up into the hundreds by now.

His own problems were more immediate. He remembered hearing about someone who set out to be a writer. Naturally, the fellow cast his eyes on the tip-top markets like Playboy and The New Yorker. He declared he wouldn’t bother to submit to any market that paid less. Either he starved or he found some other line of work, because you sure couldn’t make a living that way.

For one thing, you were competing against the entire literate world. All the top writers aimed their top stuff at places that paid best. For another, those magazines weren’t likely to buy more than one story a year from you even if you were Salman Rushdie or Stephen King. No matter how well they paid, they didn’t pay well enough to let you make a living on one story a year, or even on one story a year to each if you could do that.

And selling pieces for two hundred bucks here, or four hundred fifty there, didn’t feel the same after the big check from Playboy came in. His friends wondered why he couldn’t do that all the time. So did his father. Dad nodded when Marshall explained the facts of a writer’s life to him. He might understand them once he heard them, but they sure didn’t make him jump up and down.

They didn’t make Marshall jump up and down, either. If he weren’t living at the house where he’d grown up, if he didn’t pick up money on the side sitting for James Henry and Deborah, he would have had to look harder for a real job. He didn’t get as much from his mother as he had because James Henry was in school and had teachers to babysit him.

After he took a shower and dried his hair one evening, he came downstairs. “Do you know somebody named Sophie Lundgren?” Kelly asked.

“Mrs. Lundgren? Sure. She taught me Spanish at San Atanasio High,” he answered. “Hay un elefante en mi ropa interior.” It meant There’s an elephant in my underwear. Mrs. Lundgren hadn’t taught him that, but he wouldn’t have been able to work it out for himself without what she had taught him. After a second or two, he thought to ask, “How come?”

“Because she called a few minutes ago—wants you to call her back. I wrote her number down.” Kelly paused, too. “Sophie Lundgren taught you Spanish? She sure doesn’t sound like she’s from Mexico City.”

Marshall shrugged. “I just work here. But yeah, she did. Hey, this is L.A. People here do all kinds of shit you wouldn’t guess from their names.”

“Well, you’ve got that right,” Kelly said.

“What did she want?” Marshall asked. “I don’t think I’ve heard from her more than once or twice since I graduated, and that’s, like, a while ago now.”

“She said she was calling some of the students she liked best. She’s moving—moving a long way, I think. She wants help weekend after this one hauling boxes out to a truck. She say’s she’ll buy dinner for everybody who shows up.”

That was bound to be a cheaper way to move than paying professionals. Still, Marshall had liked Mrs. Lundgren. Seeing her one more time might be a kick. “Where’s the number? I’ll call her back.”

“It’s on a Post-it by the landline phone.”

“Okay.” Marshall ambled over. So it was, with the name in Kelly’s neat, legible script. Accurate was the word for Kelly, all right. Marshall dialed the number. It had a 310 area code, so it wasn’t too far away.

Ring… Ring… “Hello?” Yes, that was Sophie Lundgren’s voice—a whiskey baritone, or near enough. Marshall didn’t know that Mrs. Lundgren poured ’em down, but that sure had been the rumor. Her voice did nothing to disprove it, anyway. If he’d taught high school for umpty-ump years, he figured he would have drunk, too, in self-defense if for no better reason.

“Hi, Mrs. Lundgren. This is Marshall Ferguson. I hear you need some moving help weekend after this one. What time, and where do you live?”

“Thank you so much, Marshall!” his old teacher exclaimed. “Yes, Saturday a week, starting right after lunch.” She gave him the address. It was down in Torrance, but this side of the Del Amo mall—not too far to get to by bike. He wrote it down on the Post-it, too. Next to Kelly’s, his handwriting looked even sloppier than it did on its own.

“Who else’ll be there?” he asked. “Anybody I know?”

She named two or three names he didn’t recognize—they were from either before or after his time. Then she added, “Oh, and Paul and Janine Werber said they’d come.”

“How about that? I remember them, yeah,” Marshall said. He’d had serious hots for Janine Werber when he was seventeen years old. She’d been Janine O’Sullivan then: a gray-eyed blonde who looked as Irish as her name. She’d liked him okay, but not like that. She’d had eyes only for Paul. In high school, he’d already had his eye on becoming a CPA. Marshall thought Paul was the dullest thing that walked on two legs, but even he knew he might not be completely objective.

“Paul is… very reliable,” Mrs. Lundgren said.

“Right,” Marshall answered. If that was the best she could come up with, she thought Paul was the dullest thing on two legs, too. “Look, I’ll see you about one Saturday after next, okay?” He said his good-byes and hung up.

“Somebody you knew way back when?” Kelly asked.

“Uh-huh. A couple—they’ve been a couple a long time, I guess. She was kinda cute then.” Marshall didn’t want to admit too much, even to himself. “He was kinda nerdly.” That was an understatement.

One of Kelly’s eyebrows quirked. “Okay.” She left it right there. So did Marshall. If Paul and Janine were still an item all this time after graduation, what else could he do?

On the appointed day, he pedaled down to Torrance. Clouds blew past the watery sun. He got a couple of spatters of drizzle, no more. It was chilly, but he didn’t mind that. He’d work hard enough to warm up.

Mrs. Lundgren’s apartment was on the ground floor, which was good. He wouldn’t have to lug heavy stuff down stairs. Piles of boxes stood everywhere. His old teacher introduced him to a couple of guys he didn’t know. One of them said, “Hey, haven’t I seen some of your stories online?”

“Yeah.” Marshall grinned from ear to ear. He’d had one or two people recognize his name before, but only one or two. It was still a treat when it happened.

Then he forgot about it, because Paul and Janine Werber showed up. Paul had put on fifteen or twenty pounds; his hair was thinning. Janine looked… just the way Marshall remembered. Damn good, in other words.

Paul started gabbing with Mrs. Lundgren and even trying out bits of the Spanish she’d taught him. He’d always been a suckup—looked as if he still was. That left Marshall with Janine. “Long time,” he said brilliantly.

“It has been, yeah,” she said, and held out her hand. Marshall shook it. Then—Paul was paying zero attention to anything but his old teacher (and himself)—he kissed her hand and quickly let it fall. If she didn’t like that, she’d let him know about it. If she did like it… He didn’t know what he’d do then. It was like putting a story together. If you didn’t write the first sentence, you’d never see how it came out.

Her eyes widened. Whatever she’d expected, that wasn’t it. She didn’t look mad or anything, though. “What have you been up to?” she asked.

“Got out of UCSB a few years ago,” he said. “I write some stories. I sell ’em, but I’m not getting rich at it or anything. How about you? Kids and all?”

“No kids.” She shook her head. “I’m a paralegal. It’s not exciting, but it pays some bills. Paul’s practice is doing pretty well, too. We’re so busy all the time, we hardly get to see each other.”

Was that a hint? He didn’t get the chance to find out, because Mrs. Lundgren said, “Come on, people. You didn’t come over here for Old Home Week. You came to work for your dinner. So work!”

Work they did, hauling boxes and furniture out to a big U-Haul parked in front of the building. They went on talking while they worked, of course. Mrs. Lundgren, it turned out, was moving to Copala, a town on the west coast of Mexico not far from Acapulco. She spoke the language, her money would go further there, and the weather would be better. She liked it hot—to her, L.A. these days might as well have been Minneapolis.

Marshall listened to her with one ear. With the other, he listened to Janine as much as he could without—he hoped—being too blatant about it. She seemed glad to see him and glad to talk to him. She’d always liked to talk. He remembered as much. But she seemed interested in him, too. “A writer!” she said. “How cool is that?”

He shrugged, as well as he could with a box of books—why did even a little box of books always weigh a ton?—in his arms. “It’d be cooler if I could, y’know, make a living at it.”

“But it’s so creative! All I do all day is look for papers and fill out forms,” she said. He was sure she got paid more than he did for staring up to the ceiling and making feckless lunges at the keyboard. But if she wanted to think he was cool and creative, he sure wouldn’t try to tell her she was wrong.

By the time the apartment was empty and the truck was full, Marshall felt bent-kneed and long-armed, like an arthritic chimpanzee. The restaurant, a Chinese place called Helen Yue’s, was only a couple of blocks away. Had it been any farther, he might not have made it.

He told himself he sat down next to Janine by coincidence. Even he didn’t believe it, but he couldn’t prove he was lying. Paul kept talking with Mrs. Lundgren, now about tax tricks for people who lived outside the United States. He didn’t even notice when Janine gave Marshall her cell and e-mail, or when Marshall gave her his. Tax tricks, now, tax tricks mattered.

After dinner, they all went back to the Spanish teacher’s now-empty apartment. She hugged her ex-students one by one. “You get to go back home,” she told them. “Me, I get to see if I remember how to drive. I have a motel room rented for tonight, and I need to have that U-Haul at the pier by seven tomorrow morning. Ain’t life fun sometimes?”

Just then, Marshall was thinking life might be fun sometimes after all. Mrs. Lundgren stepped up into the truck, started it, and drove away. She’d be Queen of the Road wherever she went. Nobody on a bike would argue with that big, noisy, smelly thing. Marshall remembered taking internal combustion for granted. No more. No more.

The former Spanish students shook hands with one another, unchained their bikes, and climbed aboard. “Take care, Paul,” Marshall said. “See ya, Janine.”

Paul Werber kind of grunted. “See you, Marshall,” Janine said. Marshall pedaled back to San Atanasio several inches above the potholed pavement.

Colin Ferguson was reading Deborah The Wind in the Willows. It was an unabridged version, so she didn’t come close to getting all of it. But it had plenty of colored pictures. She liked those fine. And she liked sitting on the couch with her daddy while it poured outside.

Marshall came downstairs. He didn’t sound as much like a stampeding buffalo as he had when he was a teenager. He was wearing his plastic rain slicker. When he raised his bike’s kickstand and rolled it toward the front door, Colin called, “Where are you going in this lovely weather?”

“Out.” Marshall threw the word over his shoulder.

“Out where? Somewhere in particular, or kind of everywhere at once?”

“Out to lunch.”

“Who with?” Colin knew Marshall and Vanessa both could have gigged him for that. He wouldn’t have written it that way himself. But writing and talking were different critters. Dammit, they were.

“Janine.” Marshall was out the door and had it closed and locked behind him before Colin could have answered even if he’d wanted to. As a matter of fact, he did want to, but he wasn’t nearly sure what to say.

Deborah tugged at the sleeve of his sweatshirt. “Read more, Daddy!” Colin started to. Deborah let out an indignant squawk: “You already read that!” He had, too. He noticed once she reminded him. He straightened up and tried to fly right.

Marshall didn’t get home till a quarter to four. Deborah had long since had as much of Mole and Ratty and even Mr. Toad as she wanted at one dose. Marshall settled his bike on an old towel and started wiping the water he’d brought in off the foyer tiles. “Long lunch,” Colin remarked.

“Uh-huh.” Marshall didn’t look up from what he was doing.

“Have a nice time?”

“Yeah.”

Colin sighed. “Am I wrong or am I right—she is married to that Paul fellow, isn’t she?”

“Yeah—for now.” Marshall still didn’t look up.

Colin sighed again. “Look, son, I’m not gonna tell you how to run your life. You’re a grownup. You’re entitled to make your own mistakes. Lord knows I did. But I am gonna tell you this: anybody who’ll cheat with you will cheat on you, too. That’s how those things work.”

“Not always.” Marshall kept doling out words as if they cost as much as gasoline.

“No, not always,” Colin agreed, which did make his son look at him—in surprise, if he was any judge (and he was). He went on, “Not always, but that’s the way to bet.”

Marshall squeezed the old dish towel they used to dry the tiles. By his expression, he would sooner have had his hands around his father’s neck. In a voice colder than the Siberian Express, he answered, “It’s my life. You said it—I didn’t. So let me deal with it, okay?”

“Okay.” Colin sighed one more time. Then, stubborn cop that he was, he also tried one more time, choosing what he said with care: “Cheating was what shot my marriage with your mother behind the ear, you know.”

“Nah.” Marshall shook his head. “That just shoveled dirt over it, Dad. Mom wouldn’t’ve done it if she didn’t think you guys were already dead. Besides, Janine hasn’t got any kids.”

“She’s got a husband.” Colin had to struggle to force out the words. Marshall might well have been right—from Louise’s point of view, anyhow. But Colin wasn’t used to looking at things from that perspective.

Marshall let out a dismissive snort. “Not hardly. Paul won’t care. He only notices she’s around when he gets horny.”

“That’s how Janine tells it,” Colin said. “It might sound different if you were to listen to Paul.” People who wanted to do something always told stories that showed doing whatever it was was the best, the most natural, thing in the world. They told those stories to other people, and they told them to themselves. They believed them, too. As a cop, Colin had seen that more times than he could count. You didn’t need to be a cop, though. You just had to keep your eyes open.

Which Marshall wasn’t doing right this minute. Janine, no doubt, was keeping her legs open, so he had the oldest excuse in the world. The best excuse, plenty of folks would have said. And it was… for a while.

“Dad—” Marshall wasn’t going to listen to Paul. He wasn’t going to listen to his old man, either. He’d listen to Janine, and to his stiff dick.

And Colin couldn’t do thing one about it. He’d said as much to Marshall. His younger son wasn’t so very young any more. If all this ended up without a happy ending, Colin could be there to pat Marshall on the back. That was about as far as it went.

It might have a happy ending. They might discover They’d Been Meant For Each Other All Along. Colin heard the caps in his own mind, as if he were listening to a movie trailer’s voiceover. He never believed movie-trailer voiceovers. He didn’t believe this would have a happy ending, either.

“Good luck,” he said, and he meant it. “You’ll get plenty of new stuff to write about, any which way.”

Marshall rolled his eyes, as if to say What am I supposed to do with such Philistines? He went upstairs without another word. He was in love, or at least getting laid more often than he had been any time lately. No, he wouldn’t listen to anybody who didn’t see the world through similar hot-pink-colored glasses.

“Shit,” Colin muttered. “I sure wish he would.”

“Nothing we can do about it,” Kelly said later, when Colin grumbled to her. “As soon as his old teacher told him Janine was gonna be there, you could watch the brains dribbling out of his ears.”

“You know what the worst of it is?” Colin said.

“Tell me,” Kelly answered, since that was what he plainly wanted to do.

“It’s embarrassing, that’s what it is,” he said. “Far as I know, we’ve never had anybody in the family who broke up someone else’s marriage. There’s a name for people like that, and it’s not a nice name.”

“If she wasn’t already hot to trot, he wouldn’t have got anywhere with her,” Kelly said. “And if he hadn’t come along, she would have found somebody else.”

“He said pretty much the same thing,” Colin answered. “It’s fine as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go far enough. So Janine dumps Paul and grabs hold of Marshall. So yippee. But what happens when she gets itchy again six months from now, or three years, or five years? You know what happens as well as I do. But Marshall? Marshall hasn’t got a clue.”

“Or maybe he just doesn’t care. It isn’t quite the same thing.”

“He may not care now. Why should he? Things are great now. He’ll care when he’s wearing egg on his face, though.”

“Yeah, probably.” Kelly sighed. “When that happens, try not to go ‘I told you so’ too loud, okay?”

“Who, me?” Colin did his best to seem perfectly innocent. Since he was anything but, the effort fell flat. He poked his wife in the ribs. “Okay, I’ll try. Won’t be easy—I’ll tell you that.”

“Try,” she said again. “Anyway, it may blow over. Once she’s had her fling, Janine may decide she likes Paul better after all. CPAs make a lot more money than writers.”

“Huh! If it wasn’t for that Playboy sale, I’d say the stupid cat made more money than Marshall.” Colin knew he wasn’t being fair. He also knew he was being less unfair than he wished he were. Marshall wasn’t the most practical person ever hatched, but maybe Janine was. A paralegal married—for the moment—to an accountant? She didn’t sound like a love-struck waif.

No matter what she sounded like, a couple of weeks later Marshall reported, “Paul’s moved out of their house.”

“Oh, boy,” Colin said—not quite the cheer his son might have been looking for. He went on, “And when do you move in?”

“Umm… Haven’t worked that out yet,” Marshall answered. “Probably won’t be too long.”

“Well, good luck and all that,” Colin said. “We won’t rent your room out to refugees—not right away, anyhow.”

“That’s nice,” Marshall said. He wasn’t usually as dry as his father, but every once in a while… .

Colin chuckled, acknowledging the zing. Then he said, “I hope this works out for you, son. Honest to God, I do.”

“Why wouldn’t it?” Marshall returned. So many reasons sprang into Colin’s head, all of them clamoring to go first in line, that he couldn’t get any of them out. Which was bound to be just as well; Marshall knew what a rhetorical question was. The younger Ferguson added, “Who knows? You may get grandchildren who aren’t a whole country and a glacier or two away.”

“Have you talked about children with Janine?” Colin hoped his voice didn’t show his alarm. A breakup without children in the middle of it was bad. A breakup with college-age kids in it, like his, was worse. A breakup with little kids stuck in the middle was worst of all. Gabe Sanchez could sing more verses to that song than Marshall would ever want to hear.

“Not really,” Marshall said, which eased Colin’s mind… a bit. But Marshall went on, “She has said she wants kids one of these years. She’s, like, my age, so she’s starting to hear her clock ticking. Gals don’t get second chances the way we do.” He glanced at a photo of Deborah on the mantel.

“Tell it to your mother,” Colin replied. “You’ve made a fair pile of cash babysitting her second chance.”

“Hey, she didn’t have him in mind,” Marshall said, which wasn’t the smallest understatement in captivity. If Louise had thought there was any chance she might catch, she would have been more careful. Then she and Teo would be lovey-dovey to this day.

Unless they weren’t. Maybe Teo would have run into a girl he’d been sweet on in high school and found out she wasn’t attached—or wasn’t too tightly attached. Stuff like that happened all the time. And the rage that went with it was one of the many reasons police forces wouldn’t go out of business day after tomorrow—or millennium after tomorrow, either.