“Of course,” Louise echoed. She’d at least heard of Damn Yankees, which was more than she’d done with all those stupid goddamn soccer clubs.
Jared paid her. She didn’t exactly know how, considering that things at the pharmacy weren’t what anyone would call swift, but he did. Except for talking too much about things that didn’t interest her, he made a good boss. He never gave her trouble if she needed time off because James Henry was sick or had to go to the dentist or whatever the hell.
She knew she should count her blessings. She did, along with the dollars from her checks on the first and fifteenth of every month. She tried, as subtly as she knew how, to suggest to him that her interests ran in different directions. It didn’t work. She didn’t need long to decide that she could scream Will you shut the fuck up? without cutting the endless chatter about soccer and musicals, musicals and soccer.
She was there at the pharmacy the afternoon the blizzard hit Los Angeles. They’d had snow every winter since the supervolcano eruption, snow several times a winter most years since. But Louise, a Southern California native, had never seen anything like this swirling whiteness.
“Wow,” she said, pointing out through the front window. “I mean, is this Chicago or what?”
Jared’s eyes widened. The magnifying lenses of his glasses made them look owl-big. “That’s amazing,” he said. “When it gets this bad, a lot of the time they play with a yellow ball, or an orange one.”
“Do they?” Louise said tonelessly. For all she knew, or cared, the ball they used when it wasn’t snowing like the North Pole might have been pink with green polka dots. Before Jared could go They sure do and then tell her more she didn’t want to hear, she added, “I’m just wondering how we’ll get home in this.”
He rubbed his chin. When he wasn’t talking about soccer or Broadway, he sometimes said he wanted to grow a beard to see if it helped keep his face warm, but he hadn’t done it yet. “I know they’ve got chains for the buses,” he said. “They’ve used them before.”
Louise nodded—they had. But if they had to summon the buses to some central garage to get the chains, the schedule would end up screwed, blued, and tattooed. And… “I’m glad the bus stop is right across the street. I’m not sure I could find it in this if I had to go much farther. I have to walk a little ways from where I get off to my condo. That should be fun.”
“I’ve got a bit of a walk, too.” He clicked his tongue between his teeth. “Something to look forward to. An adventure.”
“I heard somewhere that an adventure was somebody else have a miserable time a long way away,” Louise said. She startled a laugh out of Jared.
He let her leave early. It wasn’t as if they were doing a lot of business, or any business at all. She was wearing Nikes. She wished she’d thought to stick galoshes in her purse, but she hadn’t, so all she could do was wish. She also wished that, like a faithful Saint Bernard, she could carry a keg of brandy on a chain around her neck.
When she got outside and the wailing northwest wind smacked her in the face, she wished for the brandy even more. The traffic lights at the corner of Van Slyke and Reynoso Drive were working, but she could see them only by fits and starts, when the gale chanced to blow away most of the snow between her and them.
She crossed the street against the light. She didn’t worry about getting hit by a car. Hardly anyone drove on the roads even when the weather was better than this. Anybody who’d get into a car now had to be crazier than Jared Watt, which was really saying something. The same went for bike riders—or she thought so till one pedaled past her.
She tripped over the snow-hidden curb on the far side of the street, but didn’t quite fall. Brushing snow off the bus bench, she sat down. She hoped again the bus wouldn’t be too late—it was bloody cold out here, and the wind didn’t help. Duh! It was cold enough to be snowing. It never used to get that cold in SoCal. It wasn’t just cold enough to snow now. It felt a lot colder than that. Cold enough to freeze to death in? Her coat was pretty good, but the side of her face the wind hit was starting to go numb.
Another guy on a bike zoomed by, head down, working hard. That would keep you warmer than just sitting around. Louise wondered whether she ought to get up and start doing jumping jacks or something. It might be a good idea, but she didn’t have the energy.
She also had no idea the bus was anywhere within miles till it loomed up out of the snow in front of her. The fare had just gone up to five dollars. She’d never been so glad to feed a fin into the slot. She would have paid a lot more to get out of that horrible wind. The bus’ heater even worked after a fashion.
Getting off was a lot less enjoyable than getting on had been. It was growing dark—growing dark fast. The snow danced and swirled in the air, for all the world as if this were somewhere in Connecticut, or maybe in a movie from the 1940s. God only knew what things were really like in Connecticut these days. Movies had nothing to do with anything real.
By the time Louise made it home, she was wishing for both steaming coffee and earmuffs. I want to get out of these clothes and into a dry martini. Somebody’d said that, though she couldn’t remember who. She didn’t give a damn about a dry martini. If they’d made a hot martini, now…
“It’s snowing, Mommy! It’s snowing!” James Henry squealed when she walked through the door. It was a big deal to him. Hell, it was fun to him—he hadn’t had to sit out in it or slog through it.
Louise had. “Really?” she said. “I never would have noticed.”
Her younger son by Colin came to the door. “I’m outa here,” Marshall said, “or I will be… .” He held out his hand. He didn’t even pretend he was doing this for anything but mercenary reasons.
After she’d given him enough greenbacks to make him stick his hand in his pocket, Louise said, “Be careful when you’re going back to the house. It’s brutal out there—worse than I’ve ever seen it before.”
“I’ll cope,” he said, but paused a moment right outside the door when the wind smacked him in the kisser. “Whoa! It is kinda rugged,” he allowed.
“Ya think?” Louise closed the door on him—she didn’t want the storm to chill down the inside of the condo. Marshall vanished from sight even before he got to the bottom of the stairs.
“Can we make a snowman, Mommy?” James Henry asked.
“Maybe right in the middle of the living room,” Louise answered. James Henry clapped his hands. He didn’t realize she was joking. Outside, the snow kept blowing and falling, falling and blowing. It wasn’t freezing inside the condo, but it wasn’t what anybody would have called warm, either. When Louise sighed, she could see her own breath. She might not have been joking so much after all.
Before she had Deborah, Kelly Ferguson had known babies were a lot of work—labor didn’t stop once the kid popped out. She’d known, yes, in an intellectual way. In that same intellectual way, she’d had a fair notion of what would happen to the world after the Yellowstone supervolcano blew.
In both cases, intellectual knowledge was one thing. Actual experience was something else again. The difference between the two was at least as profound as the difference between a picture of a steak on the one hand and the real steak first on a plate and then in your stomach on the other.
With the supervolcano, the country’s work afterwards boiled down to trying to pick up the pieces. Kelly did a lot of that with Deborah, too. But her work changed a lot faster than the country’s did. Deborah was more than a year old now, toddling unsteadily on legs that were still figuring out how to hold her up and coming out with more and more words every day.