Supervolcano: Things Fall Apart

XIII

It was May. In what Bryce Miller kept thinking of as normal times, the countryside around Wayne State would have been bursting with spring. The grass would have been green. New leaves would have decked the trees. The birds would have been singing their heads off. Half the sophomore girls would have been wearing as little as the law allowed. Nebraska or not, that would have made for some pretty fine eye candy.

Even after the supervolcano eruption, spring would at least have been thinking about showing up most years. Not in the wake of the Siberian Express and the two other, almost equally horrendous, blizzards that followed it. Good old Theocritus wouldn’t have got very far with pastoral poetry about the landscape he could see in these parts.

Snow still lay on the ground—not here and there, as it had in some other post-eruption springs, but all over. The drifts were taller than a tall man. Bryce, a tall man, could testify to that. Daytime highs hadn’t got out of the thirties yet. The weathermen kept hopefully saying they would real soon now. The weather kept making liars of the weathermen.

A crow hopped across the crusted snow. It cocked its head now this way, now that. Its beady black eyes were alert for anything that might be food. A mouse? A discarded parsnip fry? Crows weren’t fussy. They ate anything people did, and more besides.

Compared to what the winter had brought, of course, highs in the thirties seemed wonderful. Bryce was just chilly as he walked over to the library to meet Susan—she’d come to campus to do some research for an article she was writing. She still hoped for an academic job of her own, but the hiring situation looked bleaker than ever.

The paths on campus were free of snow. Machines had done the hard work at first. There weren’t enough machines to cope with the new winters, and fuel cost too much to keep them going. Like so much of what had been routine before the eruption, nowadays they were for emergency use only.

For non-emergency use, Wayne State had students with snow shovels. Throwing snow around wasn’t a requirement like passing your English courses and U.S. history. But the college paid for the work, either in money or in meal tickets at the student union. From what Bryce had heard, more shovelers chose meal tickets. The food at the union wasn’t great, but Bryce didn’t think you could get great food at any restaurant in Wayne.

A student coming the other way on a bicycle raised one hand from the handlebars to wave to Bryce. “Hey, Professor!” he called as he went past.

“Hey!” Bryce waved back. Little by little, he was getting used to students calling him Professor. The student population stayed pretty much the same age, while he—dammit!—kept getting older.

He’d started noticing that back in L.A., when he taught at Junipero High. The boys there had all looked like kids. Some of the girls, though, were definitely edible, to his eyes if not necessarily to the eyes of the law. Just how edible some of them seemed was something he’d never discussed in detail with Susan. No, he’d never done anything about it. No, he’d never even intended to. But he’d never discussed it with her, either.

Students here were college-age, of course. He’d put on a few years, too, though. And he kept putting them on. These days, even some of the girls in his courses looked like escapees from middle school. They weren’t, but they looked that way to him. It was almost reassuring that others still seemed pretty damn hot.

The girls, hot or not, also called him Professor. They called him sir, too, which made him feel all the more an antique. They were polite here, more polite than in SoCal. That part of the courtesy, he could have done without.

Susan waited for him outside the library. She never would have done that during the winter. They hugged and briefly kissed. “Find what you were looking for?” Bryce asked.

“Some of it.” Susan sighed. “I’ve filled out an interlibrary-loan slip for the rest. Will you come in and sign it for me?”

“I’d better.” Being on the faculty, Bryce had the power to call spirits from the vasty deep and obscure journals from libraries around the country. Susan, a mere spouse, didn’t. That never failed to irk her.

They bicycled back to town after he put his John Hancock on the paperwork. In due course, the journals would arrive, scholarship would advance, and all would be well with the world—except the article still wouldn’t win Susan a job.

Something was different when they got to Wayne. Several buses were letting people out at a stop not too far from their apartment. The buses were not the usual, ordinary but elderly, wheezers and groaners that hauled people around this part of northeastern Nebraska. These were elderly, but a long way from ordinary. One was olive drab. Two more were painted in faded desert camo. And a couple of others, while they sported ordinary paint jobs, had bars on the windows that suggested their intended passengers might not be thrilled about staying aboard.

“Hello!” Bryce said. “What have we got here?”

People were getting off the buses and milling around near them. By the expressions on their faces, a lot of them were getting their very first looks at Wayne, and were thinking pretty much what he’d just said. Either that or What the fuck?, which came close enough for government work.

And government work it was. The milling people sometimes hid and sometimes showed the paper banners taped to the sides of their buses. NEW HOMESTEAD ACT SETTLERS, Bryce eventually read. “Wow!” he exclaimed. If he sounded amazed, well, he was. “It really is gonna happen! How long since they passed that bill?”

“A year and a half? Two and a half years? Something like that,” Susan answered. Bryce remembered seeing on the news that the bill had finally passed, but he couldn’t recall how long ago it had been, either. Since it passed, there’d been more frantic wrangling in Congress about whether to appropriate any real, live money for it.

They must have finally coughed up the cash, because here were these buses of new homesteaders. Some of them looked as if they might possibly know something about living on a farm or in a small Midwestern town. Others seemed stunned. Bryce could read their faces with no trouble at all. When I volunteered for this, I figured anything beat staying in that goddamn camp one more minute, they were thinking. That’s what I figured, yeah, but maybe I was wrong.

Locals were coming out of houses and shops to give the newcomers a once-over. They didn’t act much happier about what they were seeing than the homesteaders did. And Wayne was a big small town, at least by the standards of this part of the prairie. People who lived here were used to the college students who came and went. Some of the smaller places in these parts, there were no strangers who came and went. Stephen King knew what he was doing when he set horror stories in tiny towns like that.

So how would those people react when buses dumped loads of new homesteaders on their doorsteps? You could recognize people just out of camps from a mile away. They were the ones with the worst clothes in the world. Polyester? In colors that would gag a K-Mart buyer? A little too big? A little too small? Somebody’d felt good about him- or herself by donating it to help the supervolcano refugees. And the poor, damned refugees had to wear it or go naked. Late-night talk-show hosts had been getting laughs from them for years.

One of these homesteaders, for instance, had on a sweater that looked as if it were made up of ragged vertical stripes of vomit in assorted colors. Once upon a time, someone had designed it. Factories had turned out the style by the thousands, in assorted sizes. Some tasteless fool had bought this one and given it to a friend—or possibly to an enemy. And the recipient had sent it to a camp, where this poor fellow got stuck with wearing it.

The truly scary thing was, he might have pulled something even worse out of a bin.

Two Hispanic kids, a boy maybe four and his sister half his age, stared at everything in Wayne with wide-eyed wonder. They clung to their mother the way a limpet clings to a rock. They’d been born in a refugee camp, Bryce realized. Till the bus ride that brought them here, they’d never known anything else. The outside world was an idea they’d have to get used to a little at a time.

Quietly, Susan said, “Watch what happens. The first time anybody who’s lived here a while has anything stolen, he’ll blame the homesteaders.”

“Wouldn’t be surprised,” Bryce agreed, also quietly. But he also wouldn’t be surprised if the homesteaders did some boosting to get things they didn’t have. The camps were full of that kind of petty—sometimes not so petty—crime. No surprise that they should be; there just wasn’t enough stuff in them to go around.

And he’d spent a lot more time listening to Colin Ferguson tell stories than Susan had. Maybe that had rubbed off on him more than he’d thought while he was doing the listening. Or maybe his wife made a better liberal than he did. It wasn’t against the law to be a conservative in a college town, as long as you did it discreetly and washed your hands afterwards.

But he wasn’t really a conservative, either, at least not one of the Know-Nothing variety that trumpeted out of the elephant’s trunk these days. He was just a cynic. Could you be a cynical liberal? It wasn’t easy.

A man in a nice wool topcoat—plainly not someone newly escaped from a camp—called, “Attention, homesteaders! Attention, homesteaders! Please form a line and follow me to the Wayne city hall. You will receive your homesteading allotments there.”

They queued up with a speed and smoothness that would have impressed Brits, let alone a watching American like Bryce. That, by God, they knew how to do—they had it down solid, in fact. How many times a day for how many years had they lined up for food, for clothes, for complaints, for the chance to charge their cell phones, for everything under the watery sun? Often enough to get really, really good at it: that was plain.

The homesteaders tramped off toward City Hall. Bryce and Susan rode back to their apartment building. The mail was junk—well, junk and a utility bill. The bill would be horrendous, or whatever was worse than horrendous. As soon as they got inside, Bryce locked the dead bolt. He didn’t always bother, but he did it often enough so Susan didn’t call him on it this time. Have to get better about remembering, he told himself. That was definitely cynical. He intended to do it anyhow.

Vanessa Ferguson remembered the days when the post office on Reynoso Drive wasn’t fortified like something in Baghdad’s Green Zone. The post office had been that way for a while now: since long before the supervolcano blew. That she could recall how it had been in less paranoid times only proved she wasn’t getting any younger.

She made sure she did a proper job of chaining her bike to the steel rack outside the building. Then she took the manila envelope from the carrying basket and went into the post office.

Her heart pounded as hard as it had when she discovered Bronislav had ripped her off. It might even be pounding harder now. But this wasn’t rage—it was fear. It wasn’t far from panic.

If this worked, it was also her revenge on the tattooed Serb pig. She had no idea—none!—what she’d ever seen in him. She must have been crazy to let him into her heart, and into her bed. She always felt like that about her ex-boyfriends. She had an extra-strength dose of it this time around.

She had such a dose of it, in fact, that she’d finally finished the story he said he’d been reading when he was really plundering passwords from her laptop. Not only had she finished it, she was going to stick it in the mail. That was why she was here. She’d mail it off. She’d sell it—first try, of course, because it was great. And, when she cashed the check, she’d do a fuck-you dance on the miserable, rotten memory of Bronislav Nedic.

God, this was scary, though! She didn’t think Bronislav could have been more frightened when he fought the Croats and the Bosnians. (She also didn’t think the Croats were Nazis and the Bosnians were al-Qaida clones any more. If Bronislav had thought so, the truth had to be something different.) Yes, part of her was sure the story would sell first time out. But she was… submitting… to… an… editor? What if he was jackass enough not to like it? He’d send it back. She didn’t think she could stand that.

She hoped the line would be short. Hell, she hoped there’d be no line. Then she could get in and get out without spending time worrying about what she was doing. Yes, other people’s bikes were already in the rack, but maybe those belonged to post office employees.

Forlorn hope. It was Saturday morning, the only time she could get here while the post office was open. Saturday morning was the only time most folks could get here. Seven or eight people stood in front of her. Only two windows were open. She’d be here a while.

And she was. When she got to a window at last, she started to explain about the return envelope inside the envelope, and how it would need postage, too. She’d worried about that along with everything else, and hoped the clerk wouldn’t be too big a moron. But the woman smiled and nodded. “Oh, you must be a writer, too,” she said. “A young man who writes comes in here all the time. He sold a story to Playboy not too long ago. Playboy! Isn’t that something?”

“Right.” Vanessa fought the urge to grind her teeth. The damned woman was talking about her own brother. The unfairness of Marshall’s selling stories while she had to nerve herself to finish one and nerve herself all over again to put it in the mail gnawed at her.

She paid for the postage and stuffed the receipt into her purse. When the story sold, she told herself, she could write that little bit off her taxes. Then she almost ran out of there. She didn’t want anything more to do with the perky clerk.

The post office was her last stop for the morning. She could have dropped in at her dad’s house—it was only a few blocks away. She went straight home instead. She didn’t like Kelly, and Kelly didn’t like her, and that was the way that worked. Dad always sided with his new wife, too, which also struck Vanessa as totally unfair. After all, she was his flesh and blood.

And she didn’t see much in Dad’s new flesh and blood, either. Why he wanted another kid when he was as old as he was… Vanessa didn’t get it, not when he already had three. At least Mom’s little boy was an oops. Not Deborah. They’d gone and had her on purpose.

That Kelly might have wanted a child with Dad never crossed Vanessa’s mind. After discovering they mixed like water and sodium, Vanessa thought about Kelly as little as she could.

She flicked the light switch by the door as soon as she walked into her apartment. When nothing happened, she said, “Shit!” Then she said something filthier in Serbo-Croatian. Then she said something filthier yet in English. She needed some mental floss to clean Bronislav out from between her ears.

Her nose wrinkled. That had nothing to do with the thieving Serb. The dishes were piled high in the sink. She’d let them slide for a while. Now they were telling her she couldn’t get away with it any more.

“Shit!” she said again. If the power was out, the hot water would go in a hurry, too—as soon as whatever was in the heaters now ran out, it would be cold all the time. Doing dishes—especially dishes that had spent some time sitting around—with cold water was a pain in the ass.

Well, so was living in a smelly apartment. She plunged in. Anything would come clean with enough soap and water and cleanser and steel wool and elbow grease. For sufficiently large values of “enough,” she thought as she scrubbed away at an extra-dirty frying pan.

She swore again a moment later. Bronislav wasn’t the one who’d come out with foolishness like that. No, it could only have come from Bryce. People you’d known and loved (or thought you loved) once upon a time didn’t want to get out of your head, no matter how much you wished they would. No. They stayed in there like unwelcome guests, and every so often one of them would pop up and yell Boo!

The place did smell fresher once the dishes were out of the sink and in the drainer next to it. But that was a fight you couldn’t win, not permanently. They’d start piling up again all too soon. And she’d start ignoring them again, till she couldn’t ignore them any more.

Monday morning meant a return to the widget works, and all the joy that went with it. The atmosphere was tense. There’d been waves of strikes back East and in the Silicon Valley because wages weren’t coming close to keeping up with skyrocketing prices. Nick Gorczany hadn’t given anybody a raise in quite a while. Everyone knew it.

Everyone also knew that doing anything about it would put you out on the street. Plenty of unemployed programmers and engineers and bookkeepers would figure low wages whaled the snot out of no wages at all.

And so people at the widget works grumbled and muttered and met in small groups for lunch. But that was all they did. Vanessa had always grumbled and muttered. She hadn’t always bothered to keep her voice down when she did it, either. That made her more popular with the other hired peons than she’d ever been when things looked better.

There had been times when she’d wanted to be popular but wasn’t. Now that she was, she discovered she didn’t care. All she cared about was the electric jolt she seemed to feel—regardless of whether the power was on—when she put her key in the lock to her apartment mailbox. Every day she didn’t hear back from the magazine to which she’d submitted was another day with a letdown in it.

She understood the mails were slow. She understood editors had to find time to sift through their slush. Intellectually, she understood all that. As far as she was concerned, intellectual understanding was for dweebs like Bryce. She wanted that acceptance letter now, dammit! She wanted the check that would come with it, too.

Some of her coworkers tried to draft her to tell Nick Gorczany they all needed more money. As politely as she could—and as rudely as she needed to—she declined the honor. She felt more than she thought, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t think. The messenger who brought the king bad news was the one who got it in the neck, not the people who’d sent him (or even her).

Mr. Gorczany did give people a raise: about a quarter of what they thought they were entitled to. In a note, he said I wish this could be more, but the economy is tough on everybody, I included. Vanessa curled her lip. That sounded just like him, all right. And, tough economy or not, he still drove his BMW from Palos Verdes Estates almost every day.

She started getting righteously pissed at the numbnuts editor who was sitting on her story. What did he think he was gonna do, hatch it? Only a small sense of self-preservation kept her from firing off a snotty query. If you made an editor mad, he’d reject you, not your story. The bastard.

Then, when she was starting to do her best to pretend to herself she’d never submitted in the first place, the return envelope showed up in her mailbox. Seeing it was such a rush, she forgot something Marshall had said. His words of wisdom were It’s the opposite of applying to college. Big envelopes are bad. Small ones are good.

Vanessa tore the envelope open, right there in the lobby. Inside sat her story, with a sheet from the magazine paper-clipped to it. She pulled it out. It was a Screw you very much for submitting form rejection. Under the printed crap, somebody’d scribbled Way too emo for us. Try the women’s mags.

“Emo? Emo?” The word tasted even worse the second time she spat it out. She’d sweated blood to show emotions honestly, and this was what she got for it? “Fucking emo?”

She stomped up the stairs. She slammed the door to her apartment hard enough to rattle half the building. Then she tore the rejection into a million pieces and flung them in the wastebasket. After a moment, the SASE and the printout of her story went in, too.

If she’d had the laptop on the kitchen table, it might have followed the papers into the trash. “Emo!” she snarled one more time. “Women’s mags!” She made that sound filthier than any porn on the Net. “Cocksucking sexist shithead!”

She didn’t usually drink by herself. Today, she poured a stiff shot of slivovitz—another leftover from Bronislav—and chugged it. It went off in her belly like a bomb. In minutes, the alcohol built a wall against the slings and arrows of outrageous editors.

All the same, she doubted she’d submit again. Certainly not any time soon. She wasn’t going to try to deal with the cretins in New York City. She had to deal with too goddamn many closer to home. At least they paid her regularly—none too well, but regularly. The jerks who got paid for bouncing stories that were perfectly good…

“To hell with ’em! To hell with all of ’em!” she said, and she unscrewed the cap on the slivovitz bottle again.

It was pouring rain when Louise Ferguson walked into the Van Slyke Pharmacy. No lights were on inside. Well, the power was out at her condo, too. She’d do what she could do by hand, and she’d have things organized so she could quickly get the data into the computer if and when electrons started chasing themselves through wires.

“Good morning, Louise,” Jared Watt said from behind the counter.

“Good morning, Jared,” Louise answered, shrugging off her rain slicker. “Good and wet.”

“It is. It is.” The pharmacist nodded. Even in the indoor gloom, the lenses of his glasses made his eyes look almost as big as eggs sunny side up. “Back before the eruption, either we would have said the rain killed a drought or we would have complained because half of L.A. was washing into the Pacific.”

“Well, we don’t need to worry about it so much any more,” Louise said. “Everything that could wash into the Pacific has gone and done it by now.”

“And isn’t that the sad and sorry truth?” Jared said.

You could always complain about the weather. They spent another few minutes doing it. Then a customer came in with a prescription. Jared filled it for her. He rang it up on a massive brass cash register that was almost certainly older than he was. The receipt book with carbons was new, but it was an old way of doing things making a comeback because the newer, niftier ways had turned unreliable.

The woman paused at the case of secondhand paperbacks. She pulled out a copy of James Michener’s The Source: literature by the pound, because even in mass-market it had to be three inches thick. “How much for this one?” she asked.

“Three dollars,” Louise answered. “With tax, three thirty-three.”

“I’ll take it,” the woman said. “Looks like it’s got enough inside to keep me going for quite a while.” She pulled a five from her purse. Louise made change for her. The woman sighed. “Eleven percent sales tax is obscene, but what can you do? The state’s as broke as we are.”

Almost all the California politicians who’d raised taxes—again—no longer held office. The voters screamed that you couldn’t squeeze blood out of a turnip. But the voters screamed just as loudly for all the services they’d enjoyed before the supervolcano blew. Sometimes you couldn’t win no matter what you did. After a supervolcano eruption seemed to be one of those times.

Carrying her prize, the woman walked out. A man came in. He bought not one but two of the hideous ceramic ornaments that gathered dust on their glass shelves. Louise took his money in silent amazement. Back when the kids were little, there’d been a Mad Magazine spoof of junk like that. One picture showed Clowns! Another showed Birds! The next hyped Clowns with Birds! And the last one was Clownbirds! The ornaments the man bought were definitely ugly enough to fall into the clownbird range. P.T. Barnum might have had the poor, kitsch-loving fellow in mind when he declared that one was born every minute.

However much she wanted to, Louise couldn’t joke about that with Jared. He was the one who’d ordered the damn things. As far as she could tell, he doted on them. He carefully brushed away the dust they gathered. And when they sold (every so often, they would), he beamed from ear to ear.

He was beaming now. “Louise,” he said, not quite out of the blue.

“Er—yes?” She knew her answer sounded nervous. Was he going to do an I-told-you-so? She’d never made any big fuss about the horrible things—politeness was her middle name. But he wouldn’t have to be a mentalist to know they didn’t float her boat.

That wasn’t what he wanted to talk about, though. He sounded a little nervous himself as he went on, “I have a couple of tickets to the Galaxy’s match next Saturday. I usually go with a friend, but Dave slipped in a puddle and broke his ankle. So would you, um, like to come with me?”

She opened her mouth. Then she closed it again without saying anything. She cared about soccer more than she cared about, oh, hunting tigers from elephantback, but not a whole lot more. On the other hand, the last time she’d been out with a man was the last time she’d gone to dinner with Teo before she found out she was pregnant. She’d thought she was done with that scene, not least because she hadn’t met a man since who seemed interested in her. Once you turned fifty, you turned invisible. Only maybe you didn’t.

When she hesitated, Jared quickly said, “You don’t have to say yes because you work here or anything. I’m not going to fire you for saying no. This is the twenty-first century. I just thought it might be fun.”

Fun. Louise wasn’t at all sure that was a twenty-first-century concept. But she said, “Let me see if I can land a babysitter for my son. His half-brother’s got a girlfriend these days, so I don’t know. But I’ll try.”

Jared nodded. “That sounds like a plan.” He didn’t make any fuss. He might be strange some ways, but he was a grownup. He knew life came with complications, and that other people needed to take care of them.

The electricity returned that evening. Louise called Marshall and told him what she needed. She waited for him to tell her no. She waited for him to enjoy telling her no. Instead, he said, “Well, you got lucky. Janine’s taking the train to Palm Springs Friday after work. Her law firm’s going to some kind of convention there. She won’t be back till Sunday night. So, yeah, I can do that. At the usual rate, I mean.”

“I didn’t ask you to do it for nothing. I’m glad you can do it at all,” Louise said. She was even gladder he hadn’t laughed in her face, but she kept that to herself.

The Galaxy (Louise discovered after a little research) played in Carson, which wasn’t far away. She began planning bus routes. But Jared said grandly, “Don’t worry about it. I’ll pick you up in the car.”

Before the eruption—even for the first couple of years afterwards—she would have taken that for granted. So would he; he wouldn’t have needed to say it. Now… Now her own car had sat in its parking space so long, she doubted it would even start. “Hey, big spender!” she exclaimed.

“That’s from Sweet Charity,” Jared said, and started singing it in his erratic baritone. Soccer and musicals. Musicals and soccer. They made his world go round—but if she said so, he’d break into the number from Cabaret.

To Louise’s relief, Marshall got to her condo fifteen minutes before Jared did. To her bigger relief, he was polite to the man who was taking her out—and who was also her boss.

“You’re the one who writes stories,” Jared said after they shook hands.

“Afraid so,” Marshall admitted.

“Well, good. Keep doing it. We all need things to read, Lord knows.” Jared turned to Louise. “Shall we go?”

“We shall,” she said, and they did. Fastening the seat belt in Jared’s Buick felt funny. No, she hadn’t done it much lately. It was so much easier and more comfortable than a bike or the bus. It was also so much more expensive. She leaned back in her seat. “I could get used to this.”

“So could I—if I lived at Fort Knox,” Jared said with a wry grin. “But this is An Occasion.” He pronounced the capital letters.

“It sure is,” Louise agreed.

Their seats in the StubHub Center were near the midfield stripe. Only it turned out to be called the halfway line—soccer’s jargon was different from American football’s, and mostly imported from England. The Galaxy’s foe was Real Omaha—Real with two syllables. Jared said they’d been Real Salt Lake till the eruption. “It means ‘royal’ in Spanish,” he explained. “Several teams in Spain have royal charters, like Real Madrid. But Real Salt Lake and Real Omaha just sound dumb.” Louise couldn’t very well argue with that.

The game was… men running around in shorts, kicking a ball, and bouncing it off their heads. If you cared, well, you were one up on Louise. The home team (Jared called them a side as often as not, as if they were onion rings) ended up winning, 1–0. One–nil, not one–nothing or one–zero. Jared was pleased. Louise was pleased that Jared was pleased. He drove her back to her condo. Louise saw only a couple of other distant cars. They got back about half past nine. Louise invited him in. Marshall reported, “James Henry crashed maybe fifteen minutes ago, so he may pop out again.” Louise nodded. That sounded like what she’d expected.

Her son by Colin didn’t hold out his hand, but he would have if Jared hadn’t been there watching. Louise paid him. He bobbed his head and took off.

James Henry didn’t make a farewell appearance. Louise asked Jared, “Feel like a drink?”

“One, sure. Bourbon if you’ve got it, whatever if you don’t. Thanks.”

“I’ve got it.” As Louise made the drinks, she wondered if she felt like a wrestling match. A man who thought a first date was a license to screw wasn’t what she was looking for. No man was better than a man like that.

But Jared didn’t reach under her blouse or into her pants. He clinked glasses with her and asked, “What did you think of the match?”

“I don’t think I’ll ever make a big fan, but it was more interesting than I figured it would be.” Louise could say that much without worrying her nose would stretch like Pinocchio’s. She added, “I enjoyed the company.” Rather to her own surprise, she meant it.

“Good,” the pharmacist said. “So did I, very much. Just so you know, I count myself lucky you walked in looking for work.”

“Well, thank you. So do I,” Louise said. Yes, she meant it not least for the paycheck. But she’d had worse bosses. Jared might be strange, but he wasn’t high-pressure strange, the way Mr. Nobashi had been at the ramen works.

After Jared finished the drink, he said his good-byes. At the door, he pecked her on the cheek like a kid from junior high—middle school, they’d say these days. Then he disappeared into the night. Louise smiled after him. If he asked her out again, she knew she’d say yes.