Supervolcano: Things Fall Apart

XIV

Before the supervolcano erupted, Kelly Ferguson had never been in Missoula, Montana. She’d been there several times since, though, first to crash on a geologist who’d escaped the eruption with her and who taught at Montana State, and then to use it as a base camp from which to study what the caldera had done and what it was doing.

Missoula was the closest functioning city to what had been Yellowstone National Park. It had got a layer of volcanic ash after the eruption, but not a thick layer. All the prevailing winds—even the jet stream—blew from the direction of Missoula toward Yellowstone. Missoula got a layer of ash anyhow. No mere winds could completely defy the supervolcano. But Missoula, unlike a lot of places farther away, didn’t get an incapacitating layer of ash.

“Old home week,” she remarked to Geoff Rheinburg as they met for dinner before setting out into the eruption zone.

“Well, yes and no,” answered the man under whom she’d studied at Berkeley. “Back in the day, you didn’t need to worry about how your husband and your little girl would like it when you disappeared into the wilderness.”

“Colin’s okay with it,” Kelly said, which didn’t stretch the truth… too far. “Deborah… I didn’t have to worry about how much I’d miss her, either.”

Rheinburg chuckled and scratched his mustache. It had more white in it than it had the last time Kelly saw him. “I remember those days,” he said. “Enjoy ’em while you’ve got ’em, because they don’t last. If I see my kids twice a year these days, I figure it’s been a good year.”

Kelly nodded. Colin’s grown children went their own way and lived their own lives. Even Marshall was out of the house at last, though he was in someone else’s and not his own. Kelly didn’t dislike Janine, though she was damned if she understood what Marshall saw in his new squeeze.

The next morning, she stopped worrying about what was going on back home. Three helicopters thuttered out of the sky. They kicked up leftover dust as they landed in an empty parking lot at the edge of the Montana State campus. Parking lots, these days, were broad, flat spaces people used for almost anything but parking.

Geoff Rheinburg eyed the whirlybirds. “Before the eruption, people around here would have thought they were black helicopters from the UN, come to steal their liberty and lock it in a jail in Bulgaria. They would’ve started shooting first and asked questions later.”

“They may yet—if they haven’t got one or two other things to worry about in the meantime,” Kelly answered.

She had one or two other things to worry about herself. The last time she’d jumped into a helicopter, it had snatched her out of Yellowstone half a jump ahead of the eruption. She hadn’t told Colin she’d be flying in this one. I can tell him after I get home, she thought. Then he won’t have anything on his mind. Man is, always has been, and always will be the rationalizing animal.

Daniel Olson waved to her as he climbed aboard another chopper. He’d escaped from Yellowstone with her. He was the geologist with the slot at Montana State. She’d stayed with him till a cop buddy of Colin’s found a way to get her back to California.

When she strapped herself into her seat, the pilot gave her a helmet with an intercom connection. She was glad to put it on. Helicopters were godawful noisy. Flying in one without protection was too much like taking up residence inside the world’s biggest Mixmaster.

The pilot’s voice came through her headphones: “Good morning, folks, and thank you for flying Off the Map Airlines today.” Everybody thought he was a comedian. As if he’d read her mind, the man went on, “You may think I’m kidding, but it ain’t funny. Where you’re going, the supervolcano erased pretty much everything that was on the map, right? I mean, that’s why you’re going there. So for God’s sake be careful, and try not to do anything too dumb while you’re poking around in the middle of nowhere.”

His opinion of geologists was about the same as Kelly’s of three-year-olds. Kelly had her reasons. Well, maybe the pilot had his, too. This might not have been the first scientific expedition he’d flown into what was literally terra incognita.

Here be dragons, Kelly thought as the rotors began to spin. In spite of the helmet, the noise was bad. But the dragon under Yellowstone had always belched fire. Now it was asleep again. She hoped.

Up went the helicopter. Missoula dropped away and disappeared to the west. For a while, the pilot followed the line of I-90. The Interstate hadn’t completely disappeared from the map, at least this far from the eruption site. In fact…

“Doesn’t the road look a little clearer than it did when we came this way in Humvees?” Kelly’s throat mike would carry her words to Geoff Rheinburg’s headphones. Without the intercom, she would have to scream, and even then he wouldn’t hear much.

“You know, I think maybe it does,” the older geologist answered. “I didn’t want to say anything, for fear I was seeing more with my heart than with my eyes.”

“Makes sense that it should,” Kelly said. “That was a few years ago now. Enough time for the wind and the rain to get rid of some more dust, anyhow.” They’d made the trek to the edge of the caldera before Deborah was born. In anybody’s life, few dividing lines are sharper than the one between childlessness and children.

Before they went too much farther, though, the dust began to obliterate the line of the Interstate and everything else. The supervolcano had belched forth too much of it around here for the weather to have cleaned it away. Most of the landscape went brownish gray. The part that wasn’t brownish gray was grayish brown.

They weren’t flying very high. Kelly snapped a few photos. She eyed the ground first with her Mark I eyeballs, then through 8x42 Bushnell binocs. She hoped to see a bush pushing up out of the ashfall or a jackrabbit hopping across the dun-colored ground. She saw… the dun-colored ground. Maybe she was still too high and going too fast. Maybe there was nothing like that to see this far east of Missoula.

Here and there, the crowns of dead lodgepole pines did stick up through the ash. When Kelly remarked on them, Professor Rheinburg said, “Five gets you ten they aren’t altogether dead. They’re probably full of wood-boring beetles chomping away and having the time of their lives.”

Kelly nodded. “You’ve got to be right.” Those beetles had been pests in Yellowstone before the eruption. The acres and acres of lodgepole pines they killed helped fuel the enormous fires of the 1980s.

Where I-90 dipped, or would have dipped, south toward Butte (or what would have been Butte), the pilot kept flying due east. “This is the line of US-12,” he said, though only his GPS could have told him so. “We’re about forty miles from Helena—say, half an hour.”

Helena was not a big city. No cities in Montana had been big even before the supervolcano blew. The relative handful of people who’d lived in the state—under a million despite almost the area of California—had liked it that way. Now only the western fringe was even remotely habitable. The rest… Well, this exploration party was going in to see what had happened to the rest.

“I would have liked to try somewhere like Salt Lake City before we hit Helena. It was farther away, and it should be in better shape.” Geoff Rheinburg shrugged. “The Mormons discouraged it, which is putting things mildly.”

Utah hadn’t been hit so hard as Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho, but it had taken a beating. “What do you want to bet that, if we did go into Salt Lake City, we’d meet some Mormons already there?” Kelly said.

“Wouldn’t surprise me one bit,” Rheinburg said. “Some people would rather worry about the wrath of God than HPO. Me, I’d sooner keep breathing.”

“Me, too.” Kelly nodded. The progressive, fatal lung disease, caused by inhaling too much volcanic ash, had already killed more than a million people—how many more, no one even seemed to want to guess. It had certainly killed more by now than the direct effects of the eruption. And it had killed most of the livestock from Calgary down to Chihuahua. North America would be years getting over that, if it ever did. Beef and lamb prices had shot up even higher and faster than gasoline.

The helicopter pilot pointed. “There’s Helena, dead ahead. I’m going to look for a place where I can set us down without kicking up too big a dust storm when I do it.”

You could tell human beings had built Helena. The shapes of buildings persisted in the dust. Some of them, the bigger ones, stuck out of it. The state capitol was only three stories high, but its dome—modeled, like so many, after the one back in Washington—had shed dust and ash better than many newer, taller structures with flat roofs.

Also thrusting up from the dust was what looked like a mosque’s minaret. Kelly hadn’t dreamt Helena had held enough Muslims to need such a grand house of worship. And, as things turned out, it hadn’t. Professor Rheinburg pointed to the minaret. “That’s got to be the Shriners’ temple,” he said.

“Oh.” Kelly felt foolish.

“Can you put us down anywhere near there?” Rheinburg asked the pilot.

“I’ll see.” Cautiously, the man brought the chopper toward the ground. The rotors kicked up some dust, but less than Kelly would have expected. As if it were landing on snow, the helicopter had skis rather than wheels. They spread its weight over a larger area.

The copter crunched as the skis took up the weight. Kelly both felt that and heard it. The pilot cut the rotor. The blades windmilled to a stop. In the sudden quiet, Kelly took off her helmet and put on a surgical mask that covered her mouth and nose and a pair of tight-fitting goggles. She wanted to study the ash and dust. More intimate contact, she could do without.

Geoff Rheinburg also got ready to go outside. The pilot also donned mask and goggles as the other two copters landed not far away. When Rheinburg opened the door, the first thing Kelly heard was a raven’s grukking call. Her old prof beamed—or she thought so, though the protective gear made it hard to be sure. “Something lives here!” he said.

“Or at least passes through,” she replied.

His feet crunched in the fine grit when he got out. He took a few steps. His shoes printed waffle patterns and small Adidas logos at each one. Kelly’s sneakers were old. Time had blurred their sole patterns: when she walked, she left no advertising for wind and rain to erase.

Geologists were getting down from the other helicopters, too. Professor Rheinburg threw his arms wide to draw all goggled eyes to him. Then verse burst forth from behind his mask:

“‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’

Nothing remains besides. Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

“Wow!” Kelly said softly. “Oh, wow!” The poem deserved better; she knew as much. But that was what she had in her. Shelley, of course, was writing about ancient Egypt… and also about everyone who thought he was unforgettably splendid. Fate did its number on Ozymandias, and now fate was doing its number on the United States.

Daniel Olson took a picture of the dusty, grit-scarred minaret sticking up out of the ash and dust. “Well, we’re here,” he said, which also wasn’t poetry but was true enough. “Let’s see what we’ve got.”

They didn’t need long to find some small rodent tracks—like Kelly’s shoeprints, without visible logos—in the dust. There were a few insects, and here and there a weed poked its way up toward the sun. It wasn’t abundance. By any standards except those of the harshest desert, it was devastation. But it was life.

“We definitely have more going on here than we did when we went to the caldera,” Rheinburg said. “We’re farther from the eruption site, and more time has gone by. Bit by bit, the planet is healing up. A few thousand years from now, you’d hardly know anything had happened.”

“Not on a planetary scale,” Kelly said. “But that you you were talking about, who he’d be, what language he’d speak, what he’d think and feel about what he was looking at—the supervolcano would influence all that.”

After a moment, Rheinburg nodded. “You’re right. It’s a question of scale, isn’t it?”

Kelly nodded back. When you looked at people and what they did, you saw one thing. When you looked deeper and wider, at plate tectonics and at magma climbing up through the crust till it burst out like pus from a popped pimple, you saw something else again. Which view was true? Was either? Did you need both—and others besides—to get some kind of feel for what was really there? Would you ever have any idea of what was really there? All you could do was try.

They walked along. They all had printouts of street maps from before the eruption. The minaret, the capitol, and the sun oriented them. Here and there, wind and rain had cleaned the ashfall away from bits and pieces of other buildings. Glassless windows stared back at them like dead eyes.

Rainwater had carved gullies through the ash and dust. Erosion in action, Kelly thought. Geology 101. Something glittered at the bottom of one of the larger new gulches, several feet down. “Is that a big flake of mica?” Professor Rheinburg asked.

Kelly peered down at it. “That,” she said after a moment’s study, “is a Coors Light can.”

“Oh,” Rheinburg said in deflated tones. “I suppose the water’s gone through some buildings—and some gutters—uphill from here.”

The geologists took specimens from the surface. They used probes to dig deeper into the volcanic ash and dust. Eventually, scientists would collect samples from all over the ashfall zone, at varying distances from the supervolcano caldera and at varying depths. As Kelly meticulously labeled another tube full of volcanic ash, she feared that eventually would be a long time coming. The resources and the drive to gather the data just weren’t there.

After a while, Kelly said, “I wonder how long it’ll be before people can start living here.”

“Not in my lifetime,” Geoff Rheinburg said. Like his mustache, the hair that stuck out from under his broad-brimmed hat was gray, almost white. But he went on, “Not in yours, either. In your little girl’s? Maybe.”

That sounded about right to Kelly. Krakatoa turned into a jungle again less than a lifetime after the roar of its eruption was a shot heard almost halfway round the world. Krakatoa had been a piddly little thing next to the Yellowstone supervolcano, but Helena was a lot farther from the eruption site than the edges of the Indonesian island had been.

They put up tents and stayed in the buried city overnight. MREs were uninspiring, but they did fill the belly. And camp stoves let the geologists and chopper pilots fix coffee and tea.

When morning came, they went into one of the buildings through a window. Volcanic ash and rain had done their worst inside. They found no skeletons during their brief exploration. It was a relief of sorts, but Kelly wondered if that just meant the people who’d been in there had died fleeing instead.

Years too late to worry about that now, she thought. All the same, she didn’t like wondering about how many dead lay blanketed under the ashfall. Pompeii and Herculaneum, only spread out over the heart of a continent. She wasn’t sorry to fly back to Missoula that afternoon, not even a little bit.

Deborah was excited to ride in a car, even if she did have to sit in her car seat to do it. It was a rare treat; Colin didn’t take the old Taurus out very often. But, while Kelly was off in Montana, he made sure the beast ran. LAX wasn’t far from San Atanasio. Better for him to go over there and pick her up than for her to schlep luggage on the light rail line and the bus.

He drove carefully. He was out of practice. And the people on two wheels and three, who dominated the streets these days, didn’t have enough practice at looking out for cars. Deborah’s presence inhibited him from calling some of the pinheads what they deserved. He knew one cop who’d told his kids before the eruption that cussing in the car didn’t count. He sympathized.

The twenty-first century was still in effect at the airport. LAX had generators to keep the power running 24/7/365. You wouldn’t want the lights going out and the computers crashing when a 747 was fifty feet off the ground. The people on the plane really wouldn’t want that happening. Cell phones and WiFi worked all the time around here, too.

And there were a lot more cars than Colin was used to seeing. If you weren’t staying near the airport, cabs would take you where you needed to go. You would pay an arm and a couple of legs for the privilege, but you paid for everything these days. Oh, did you ever!

Still, traffic wasn’t the insane nightmare it had been before the eruption—nowhere close. And Colin easily found a space when he pulled into a parking structure. That wouldn’t have happened in pre-eruption days, either. He locked the car—one conditioned reflex that hadn’t faded—and headed for baggage claim, making sure Deborah held his hand.

He hadn’t been there long when his phone rang. Kelly was calling. “Yo, babe,” Colin said.

“We’re down,” she told him. “We’re taxiing to the terminal. Won’t be long.”

“Sounds good. Love you. ’Bye.” He stuck the phone back in his pocket.

“That was Mommy!” The idea was so exciting, it made Deborah jump up and down.

“Nah. That was a salesman, trying to get me to buy spinach and beets.” Colin named two of Deborah’s least favorite vegetables.

“Silly!” Deborah tossed her head in scorn. She’d never heard I didn’t come to town on a turnip truck, Charlie, but that was the vibe she gave off. “You said ‘babe.’ You said ‘love you.’ So that was so Mommy!”

She was her own little person. She could walk. She could talk. She could think. She was good at it, in fact. “Okay, Sherlock. You got me,” Colin said.

“I’m not Sherlock. I’m Deborah! Talk sense, Daddy!”

Instead of talking sense, Colin tried bribery: he gave her a granola bar. She chomped away. The bar declared that it was gluten-free. It was, too: the grains in it were buckwheat and oats. Wheat wasn’t so hard to come by as a good New York strip would have been, but you couldn’t take it for granted any more.

People coming out of the boarding area started gathering at the carousel for Kelly’s flight. Colin remembered the days when you could meet somebody right at a gate. Those had vanished long before the supervolcano blew.

“Mommy! Mommy! Mommy!” Deborah saw Kelly before Colin did. She streaked toward her, running a little faster than light. Colin followed more sedately, as befit his years and the small paunch he still had in spite of all the bike riding.

Kelly picked Deborah up and kissed her. Since she already had a backpack and an overnight bag, she was handling a lot of extra weight. Despite wiggles, Colin took Deborah off her hands. “My turn,” he said. “I want to kiss your mommy, too.”

“O-kay,” she said grudgingly—that was in the rules, even if it wasn’t too far in them.

As they walked out to the car, Colin asked, “What was it like, going into a town where nobody’s been for years?”

“Eerie,” Kelly said. “That’s the only word that fits. Geoff Rheinburg quoted from ‘Ozymandias.’”

“What’s Ozymandias?” Deborah asked.

“Not what, hon—who. He was a king in ancient Egypt—a pharaoh, they called them—a long time ago. A man named Shelley wrote a poem about the ruins of his statue.”

“Haven’t thought of that one in a long time,” Colin said. “Not since English lit in high school.” But, once reminded, he did bring back the images of arrogance and desolation. Slowly, he nodded. “It fits, all right.”

“I thought so, too. Maybe it fits too well,” Kelly said. “Everything we worked so hard to build… all ruins now.”

They’d got to the Taurus. Colin opened the trunk. With a groan of relief, Kelly shed her backpack. Colin threw her bag in it with it. “Most of us did the best we could most of the time,” Colin said. “That’s about as much as you can expect from people.”

He had to pay to get out, even though he hadn’t been there more than a few minutes. Like every public institution these days, LAX grabbed every nickel it possibly could. You got less, you paid more, and they expected you to thank them for it.

“See any scavengers in there?” Colin asked. “I know Vanessa ran into some—and even into some survivors—when she did cleanup work in Kansas.”

“That was on the fringes of the ashfall, though. This was only a hundred and fifty miles or so from the eruption,” Kelly said. “Nobody could survive there. You might be able to ski in from Missoula or something, but you’d have to take all your own supplies and you couldn’t bring out anything much.”

“Snowmobile?” he suggested.

“Mm, maybe,” Kelly said. “But there’s still an awful lot of dust to kick up. And if you broke down, you’d be an awful long way from a garage. I wouldn’t want to try it, that’s for sure.”

“Yeah, Triple-A service might be on the slow side,” Colin said.

“What’s Triple-A?” Deborah asked. With magnetic letters on the fridge, she was starting to learn the alphabet.

“They’re people who help fix your car if it breaks down,” Kelly explained.

“Did they help Ozymandias?” Deborah remembered the name. She’d be dangerous when she got older. She was already dangerous, in fact.

“Ozymandias didn’t have a car. They didn’t know about cars when Ozymandias was king,” Colin said.

“Why not?”

“Nobody’d thought of them yet,” Colin said. How were you supposed to explain the idea of technological change to a preschooler? Hell, plenty of allegedly adult elected officials didn’t get it.

Luckily, he didn’t have to try. Deborah didn’t start the endless Why? routine that drives so many parents straight up a wall. A few months earlier, chances were she would have. She was changing, sometimes, it seemed, every day. She was growing.

Colin, on the other hand, was getting to the point where he wanted things to stay the way they were for as long as they could. When you saw sixty looming ahead like a giant pothole in the road, all the changes ran in the wrong direction. You got older. You got creakier. You saw your father-in-law the dentist more often, and for more horrible things. He’d retire for real pretty soon, and you’d go see some kid instead.

He turned right off Braxton Bragg and on to the street where he lived. A few blocks later, he turned in to his driveway. He stopped the car and killed the motor. “We’re home,” he announced.

“Yay!” Deborah said. Colin couldn’t have put it better himself.

Louise Ferguson walked into the Carrows on Reynoso Drive to have lunch with Vanessa. Marshall was babysitting for James Henry. That would cost more than the lunch did. If he’d known why Louise wanted him to keep an eye on his half-brother, he might not have come at all. He didn’t go out of his way for anything that had to do with his older sister.

As the hostess led her to a table, Louise wondered why she kept coming to this Carrows. She’d had some seriously unpleasant lunches here with Vanessa and with Colin. Habit, she supposed. She’d been coming here since long before the eruption, since the days when she was still married to Colin. And the food was never too bad or too expensive. You could do worse.

She might have known the server would put her at the table where she’d sat with Colin when she had to tell him she was pregnant and Teo had bailed on her. She’d had days she remembered more fondly. Yes, just a few.

Here came Vanessa, on a bicycle. She chained it to the rack in front of the restaurant. That hadn’t been there before the supervolcano went off. Weeds pushed through cracks in the asphalt of the parking lot now. From where Louise was sitting, she couldn’t see any cars parked on it.

She waved when her daughter came inside. Vanessa hurried to the table. Louise stood up. They briefly hugged, then drew apart again. “How you doing, Mom?” Vanessa asked as they sat down across from each other.

“I’m here,” Louise answered dryly. “You?”

“Here,” Vanessa agreed. “Still trying to climb out of the hole that miserable Balkan bastard left me in. The goddamn cops in Alabama just won’t go after him. He didn’t steal from anybody there, so for them it’s like it never happened. SoCal might as well be Mongolia as far as the rednecks are concerned.”

“Are you ready to order?” Carrows seemed to specialize in bright-eyed, smiling waitresses. This one must have heard the end of Vanessa’s snarl, but she didn’t let on.

“Let me have the bacon and eggs and hash browns,” Louise said. Vanessa chose the same thing, only with a slice of ham instead of the bacon. Eggs, pork, potatoes… You could still get those. The selection didn’t come with toast, the way it would have before the eruption.

When the waitress took the orders back to the kitchen, Vanessa asked, “What have you been up to? Are you getting any?”

Louise wouldn’t—couldn’t—have been so blunt if you’d put her on the rack. “You always were charming, dear,” she murmured, and sipped at her water. Water was still free. Los Angeles, these days, had more than it knew what to do with.

Vanessa just shrugged. “Hey, why waste time beating around the bush?”

“As a matter of fact, I am,” Louise answered, and had the satisfaction of startling her daughter. She didn’t say the man she was sleeping with was her boss. Vanessa would have had some remarks on that score, all of them no doubt pointed but none germane. She did add, “He’s very nice. It’s… comfortable.” She looked for the right word, and found it after a moment.

“Comfortable!” It wasn’t a word, or an idea, to suit Vanessa. “What good is that? I want a man who makes my heart pound, a man who’s exciting!”

“Wasn’t it exciting when Bronislav siphoned all the money out of your savings?” Louise couldn’t resist the jab. Truth to tell, she didn’t try very hard.

Vanessa glared at her. “That’s a low blow, Mom.”

“Well, if you can take shots at what I’m looking for, why shouldn’t I be able to do the same thing back?”

Vanessa didn’t answer. Louise didn’t need to do a mind-reading act to know what she was thinking, though. She was thinking she didn’t like to be on the receiving end. She never had. Unfortunately, life didn’t let you dish it out all the time. It would have been a lot more fun if it had.

Before they could start slanging each other for real, the waitress came back with their food. “That was fast,” Louise said—talking to someone besides her daughter might take the edge off things.

“We want to keep people happy,” the girl said. No doubt they also wanted to move as many customers as they could through the tables they had, but that didn’t sound so friendly. The waitress went on, “Remind me who had the ham and who had the bacon.”

After they sorted it out, Vanessa said, “She’s supposed to remember that, or else write it down.” But she didn’t grumble loud enough for the girl to overhear.

Nothing like bacon and eggs—except maybe ham and eggs—to improve your attitude. The silence in which mother and daughter ate was grim at first. It grew more companionable as their plates emptied. “That’s pretty good,” Louise said when she was almost finished.

“It is, isn’t it?” Vanessa sounded surprised the lunch was good, and even more surprised to be agreeing with her mother.

“I think the hash browns are from fresh potatoes. That’s what does it,” Louise said. “They’re more trouble than they’re worth to do at home. But the frozen hash browns you can get aren’t the same when you cook ’em.”

“They sure aren’t.” Vanessa agreed with her again. “Potato bricks. They’ve got about as much taste as cement, too.”

“They do.” Now Louise was doing the agreeing, and laughing while she did it.

“You know,” Vanessa said, “the way things are these days sucks. I mean, sucks bigtime.”

“Now that you mention it, yes.” Louise couldn’t very well quarrel with that. No one in her—or even his—right mind could. “And we’re lucky, as far as these things go. Power on and off, too much rain, a little snow in the wintertime… Your brother in Maine would trade in a minute, I bet.”

“If Rob doesn’t like it, why doesn’t he move back here?” Vanessa said.

“Well, I don’t exactly understand that, either,” Louise admitted. When Rob’s wife got pregnant, she’d thought that would make a perfect excuse for leaving the permafrost behind. But Rob and Lindsey and, by now, the baby were still there.

“Besides, I wasn’t just talking about the weather,” Vanessa said. “Prices are flying so high, you can’t even see them any more. Nobody can afford to drive a car except my boss, the asshole. And men are worse than ever, if you ask me. More depends on muscle now, so they think they’re hot shit in a crystal goblet. Makes me want to puke.”

Vanessa was touchy. She always had been. She got affronted even when she had no good reason to. When she did have a reason… Well, anything worth doing was worth overdoing, as far as Vanessa was concerned.

She had plenty of good reasons here. All the same, Louise asked, “What can you do about any of that?”

“I’d like to knock some of their stupid heads together, smack some sense into them.” Vanessa muttered darkly about cold diarrhea in a Dixie cup, which was the other half of what she’d said a minute before. Her mouth twisted. “Most of what I can really do is piss them off. Better than nothing, but not enough better.”

The waitress brought the—handwritten—bill. Louise paid it. She and her daughter walked out together. As Vanessa unlocked her bike, she lit a cigarette. “When did you start doing that?” Louise exclaimed. “It’s not healthy.”

“You live. Then you die. So what? While I live, I want to live, dammit, not just exist.” Vanessa blew out smoke. A little sheepishly, she went on, “I don’t smoke much. I can’t afford to. These friggin’ things are expensive.”

“You shouldn’t do it at all,” Louise said.

“Yes, Mommy,” Vanessa said, which meant she wouldn’t listen. When had she ever? She pedaled away. Sighing, Louise walked toward the bus stop.