"Forty-six inches," she said.
Good, he thought. From her voice he’d been worried it might not be snowing in Cincinnati after all. "And it’s still coming down hard. Oh, they just called my name. I’d better go."
"You do that," she said.
"All right. I love you, honey," he said, "I’ll be home as soon as I can," and hung up the phone.
"You’re married," Shara said, standing in the door of the bathroom. "You sonofabitch."
Paula didn’t say yes to Jim’s proposal after all. She’d intended to, but before she could, the viola player had cut in. "Hey, wait a minute!" he’d said. "I saw her first!"
"You did not," Jim said.
"Well, no, not technically," he admitted, "but when I did see her, I had the good sense to flirt with her, not get engaged to Vampira like you did."
"It wasn’t Jim’s fault," Paula said. "Stacey always gets what she wants."
"Not this time," he said. "And not me."
"Only because she doesn’t want you," Paula said. "If she did–"
"Wanna bet? You underestimate us musicians. And yourself. At least give me a chance to make my pitch before you commit to this guy. You can’t get married tonight anyway."
"Why not?" Jim asked.
"Because you need two witnesses, and I have no intention of helping you," he pointed at Jim, "get the woman I want. I doubt if Stacey’s in the mood to be a witness either," he said as Stacey stormed back in the sanctuary, with the minister in pursuit. Stacey had on her wedding dress, a parka, and boots.
"You can’t go out in this," the minister was saying. "It’s too dangerous!"
"I have no intention of staying here with him," Stacey said, shooting Jim a venomous glance. "I want to go home now." She flung the door open on the thickly falling snow. "And I want it to stop snowing!"
At that exact moment, a snowplow’s flashing yellow lights appeared through the snow, and Stacey ran out. Paula and Jim went over to the door and watched Stacey wave it down and get in. The plow continued on its way.
"Oh, good, now we’ll be able to get out," the minister said and went to get her car keys.
"You didn’t answer my question, Paula," Jim said, standing very close.
The plow turned and came back. As it passed, it plowed a huge mass of snow across the end of the driveway.
"I mean it," Jim murmured. "How about it?"
"Look what I found," the viola player said, appearing at Paula’s elbow. He handed her a piece of wedding cake.
"You can’t eat that. It’s–" Jim said.
"–not bad," the viola player said. "I prefer chocolate, though. What kind of cake shall we have at our wedding, Paula?"
"Oh, look," the minister said, coming back in with her car keys and looking out the window. "It’s stopped snowing."
"It’s stopped snowing," Chin said.
"It has?" Nathan looked up from his keyboard. "Here?"
"No. In Oceanside, Oregon. And in Springfield, Illinois."
Nathan found them on the map. Two thousand miles apart. He checked their barometer readings, temperatures, snowfall amounts. No similarity. Springfield had thirty-two inches, Oceanside an inch and a half. And in every single town around them, it was still snowing hard. In Tillamook, six miles away, it was coming down at the rate of five inches an hour.
But ten minutes later, Chin reported the snow stopping in Gillette, Wyoming; Roulette, Massachusetts; and Saginaw, Michigan, and within half an hour the number of stations reporting in was over thirty, though they seemed just as randomly scattered all over the map as the storm’s beginning had been.
"Maybe it has to do with their names," Chin said.
"Their names?" Nathan said.
"Yeah. Look at this. It’s stopped in Joker, West Virginia, Bluff, Utah, and Blackjack, Georgia."
At 7:22 p.m., the snow began to taper off in Wendover, Utah. Neither the Lucky Lady Casino nor the Big Nugget had any windows, so the event went unnoticed until Barbara Gomez, playing the quarter slots, ran out of money at 9:05 p.m. and had to go out to her car to get the emergency twenty she kept taped under the dashboard. By this time, the snow had nearly stopped. Barbara told the change girl, who said, "Oh, good. I was worried about driving to Battle Mountain tomorrow. Are the plows out?"
Barbara said she didn’t know and asked for ten rolls of nickels, which she promptly lost playing video poker.
By 7:30 p.m. CNBC had replaced its logo with Digging Out, and ABC had retreated to Bing and White Christmas, though CNN still had side-by-side experts discussing the possibility of a new ice age, and on Fox News, Geraldo Rivera was intoning, "In his classic poem, ‘Fire and Ice,’ Robert Frost speculated that the world might end in ice. Today we are seeing the coming true of that dire prediction–"
The rest had obviously gotten the word, though, and CBS and the WB had both gone back to their regular programming. The movie "White Christmas" was on AMC.
"Whatever this was, it’s stopping," Nathan said, watching "I-80 now open from Lincoln to Ogalallah," scroll across the bottom of NBC’s screen.
"Well, whatever you do, don’t tell those corporate guys," Chin said, and, as if on cue, one of the businessmen Nathan had met with that morning called.
"I just wanted you to know we’ve voted to approve your grant," he said.
"Really? Thank you," Nathan said, trying to ignore Chin, who was mouthing, "Are they giving us the money?"
"Yes," he mouthed back.
Chin scribbled down something and shoved it in front of Nathan. "Get it in writing," it said.
"We all agreed this discontinuity thing is worth studying," the businessman said, then, shakily, "They’ve been talking on TV about the end of the world. You don’t think this discontinuity thing is that bad, do you?"
"No," Nathan said, "in fact–"
"Ix-nay, ix-nay," Chin mouthed, wildly crossing his arms.
Nathan glared at him. "–we’re not even sure yet if it is a discontinuity. It doesn’t–"
"Well, we’re not taking any chances," the businessman said. "What’s your fax number? I want to send you that confirmation before the power goes out over here. We want you to get started working on this thing as soon as you can."
Nathan gave him the number. "There’s really no need–" he said.
Chin jabbed his finger violently at the logo False Alarm on the screen of Adler’s TV.
"Consider it a Christmas present," the businessman said, and the fax machine began to whir. "There is going to be a Christmas, isn’t there?"
Chin yanked the fax out of the machine with a whoop.
"Definitely," Nathan said. "Merry Christmas," but the businessman had already hung up.
Chin was still looking at the fax. "How much did you ask them for?"
"Fifty thousand," Nathan said.
Chin slapped the grant approval down in front of him. "And a merry Christmas to you, too," he said.
At seven-thirty, after watching infomercials for NordicTrack, a combination egg poacher and waffle iron, and the revolutionary new DuckBed, Bev put on her thin coat and her still-damp gloves and went downstairs. There had to be a restaurant open somewhere in Santa Fe. She would find one and have a margarita and a beef chimichanga, sitting in a room decorated with sombreros or pińatas, with striped curtains pulled across the windows to shut the snow out.
And if they were all closed, she would come back and order from room service. Or starve. But she was not going to ask at the desk and have them phone ahead and tell her the El Charito had closed early because of the weather, she was not going to let them cut off all avenues of escape, like Carmelita. She walked determinedly past the registration desk toward the double doors.