“Does everyone like pancakes and sausage?” Robby asked.
Judy nodded. She took a seat next to Brad.
Ted stood behind a chair and held the back of it as he spoke—“I’m just here for introductions. I’ll leave you to dinner. Brad,” he extended his hand again, “I’m sure I’ll see you again soon.”
“Okay?” Brad said, shaking the man’s hand.
Without further explanation, Ted waved and then left by the front door.
“Pancakes?” Robby asked Brad again.
“Yeah, sure, absolutely,” Brad said.
Robby turned towards the kitchen.
“How can I help?” Brad called after Robby.
“Just have a seat and I’ll be right back,” Robby said as he propped open the swinging door with a high chair.
Brad sat down reluctantly and smiled at Judy.
“I wish I could help with something,” Brad said. “We can’t just let the kid do all the work, can we?”
“Don’t worry about it,” Judy said, smiling. “Robby likes to cook for people every now and again. He prefers not to have an audience though.”
“Oh,” Brad said. “So you’ve known Robby for a while then? Are you related?”
“No,” she said, smiling. “I’ve only known him for a month or so. We met at the grocery store.”
“Oh,” Brad said. “So where were you living when everything happened? Were you in Portland.”
Judy put her hand on the table between them, as if she could pin the conversation right there, on the tablecloth. “Do you mind if we wait until Robby comes back before we talk about how we all got here? He’s heard it all before, but we always like to make sure everyone is present when we talk about recent history. ‘More ears pick up more details,’ he says.”
“Sure, sure. That makes sense,” Brad said. “How about farther back? Can we talk about what we did before?”
“Of course,” Judy said. She smiled and looked down at her hand as she withdrew it to her lap. She touched her ear before she began to speak. “I used to work in marketing for a little company downtown. We did things like direct mail, emails, magazine ads, you know—increasing brand awareness and stuff.”
“Cool,” Brad said. “What was the product?”
“I don’t know,” she said, smiling a tight, close-lipped smile. “I mean I do, but I don’t really. I’d only worked there a couple of months, and it seemed like we were just selling air.”
Brad smiled and nodded. “I think I’ve worked for that company too,” he said.
“What do you do?” she asked.
“I was a contractor,” he said.
“Like construction?” she asked.
“No, nothing so practical. I did computer stuff—web stuff and programming,” he said.
“Sure, okay,” she said. “Good work?”
“Not really,” he said. “But it paid the bills.”
Judy nodded and pushed a wrinkle out of the tablecloth with her finger. Brad was careful to keep his hands on his lap, one on each thigh. It was a trick he used whenever he spoke in public. With his hands on his thighs he would keep his feet flat on the floor and sit up straight. If he slouched, he tended to stammer. Good posture brought clear speaking.
“I’m just wrapping up,” Robby yelled from the kitchen.
“Is everything okay with the other guy? Ted?” Brad asked.
“I think so,” Judy said. “He doesn’t like gatherings. Or, I mean, he likes them, but he doesn’t like to stay. He just wants to be introduced and then he usually heads on his way.”
Robby came in holding a serving tray with both hands. He brought plates, utensils, and a big stack of pancakes.
“They’ve got a great gas grill out back, so we like to do gatherings here,” Robby said as Brad stared at the pancakes. To Brad, the pancakes looked like civilization, and smelled like heaven. He kept his hands in his lap as Robby and Judy passed around the plates, silver, and food. Robby doled out equal portions to everyone, and Judy used her fork to put two of the pancakes back on the center stack.
Brad wanted to dive into the food, but waited as everyone fixed their plates just so.
“You wouldn’t believe how long it’s been since I’ve eaten any decent food,” Brad said.
“It shows on your face,” Judy said. “No offense.”
“None taken,” Brad said.
As soon as Robby lifted his fork, Brad tore into his stack of pancakes and savored the authentic maple syrup. That syrup hadn’t come from a Denny’s. Brad would have bet a thousand dollars on it if money still meant anything. That syrup came from someone’s backyard maple tree.
“This is fantastic,” Brad said.
“Thanks,” Robby said. “It’s one of the few things I cook well.”
“I’ll say,” Judy said. She and Robby shared a smile. Brad couldn’t tell if her statement was a compliment, or a light-hearted jab.
“So did you guys wait to talk about how we got here?” Robby asked through a mouthful of food.
“Yes, are we waiting for Ted too?” Brad asked. “Judy said we should all be here, but I’m dying to know what you guys know.”
Robby nodded as he chewed. He wiped his mouth and set down his fork before he replied.
“No, we don’t have to wait for Ted,” Robby said. He pushed away from the table and went to the counter to grab three bottles of water. After he drank, he told Brad and Judy his story.
Judy nodded at all the right spots, but it was clear she’d heard it all dozens of times. Brad listened closely to Robby’s account of Thanksgiving on the island. The boy’s story seemed to have coherent details and no exaggeration, but it was hard to take everything Robby said as a gospel truth. Brad wondered how much of the story was colored by Robby’s age and lack of experience. Robby told everything, including how he met Judy and the days leading up to the dinner they all were currently sharing.
Brad quickly understood the wisdom of this approach. With Robby’s entire story told from his perspective, there was no blended viewpoint. When Judy began, she told all of her details even though some of her story shared many of the same elements as Robby’s. They both told of snowstorms, TV and radio broadcasts fading to static, and people disappearing. She attempted to drive south, but turned back when she found all the wrecked-car corpses lining the roads.
“I wasn’t scared,” she said deliberately. “I wasn’t. I mean I wasn’t scared of the dead bodies, but I thought there was probably some plague or something that infected everyone down there. I figured it would be safer to come back here. Everyone was gone here, but at least there weren’t dead bodies everywhere.”
Brad nodded. Robby stopped eating while he listened to her account.
“I saw a couple of people who looked like their eyes had burst,” Brad said. “It was like they’d been exposed to low pressure or something, and their eyes just popped out. I mean, not popped, but burst.” They sat for a second before he spoke again. They all nudged their plates away. “I’m sorry, you were right in the middle of your story.”
Judy picked up the thread again with how she returned to her apartment and figured out how to survive. After a few weeks, she met Robby in the grocery store. Here, apart from the times they’d been alone, her story and Robby’s were fairly identical. They both had sketchy descriptions of their daily activities. Brad sensed plenty of room in there to hide many details, but he didn’t probe with questions.
When Judy and Robby turned to Brad for his side of the story, he started immediately after the explosion that woke him up. He left out any account of the casually-dressed government guys, spinning rocks, killer vines, and fugue-like flashbacks. He started with the snow, and how it was almost immediately too deep to make any attempt at escape. The beginning of his story stumbled, but everything flowed better once he started talking about the snowmobile journey.