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“Good.” He nodded. “Don’t. Arguing will get you a yellow card. If you do it too much, it will get you a red.”

She’d soaked up enough soccerspeak to know that a yellow card meant you were in trouble, while a red card meant they threw you out of the match. She had no idea what she would do with her arcane knowledge, but she had it.

She poked him in the ribs. Colin had almost never reacted to that. Neither had Teo. Jared wiggled; he was gratifyingly ticklish. “Guess what?” she said.

“What?” Jared said. Not Chicken butt, the way Colin would have. He hadn’t noticed even the kids stopped thinking it was funny after a while.

Louise poked him again. “You can’t fire me now, you know. If you try, I’ll hire an attack lawyer and our whole sordid story will come out in court. It would be in the newspapers, too, only the newspapers don’t pay attention to anything any more.”

She didn’t faze him. Well, she hadn’t meant to. You couldn’t (or you’d better not, anyhow) say something like that unless both you and the person you said it to knew damn well you were kidding. “If I’d thought there was any chance I would ever have to fire you, I wouldn’t have made my lewd advances to begin with,” Jared said with as much dignity as a naked man could show. “And since you don’t seem to understand that, I see I’m going to have to give you a severe tongue lashing.”

Which he did. Louise wasn’t sure how severe it was. She was sure that, after he got done giving it, all she wanted to do was roll over and go to sleep. That was supposed to be what men did, which had nothin’ to do with nothin’.

The only problem was, she couldn’t. Instead, she went into the bathroom. When she came out, she started getting dressed. “I’ve got to get home,” she said regretfully. “Otherwise, Marshall will soak me even harder for making sure James Henry doesn’t burn down the condo.”

Jared sat up. He reached down, picked up his slacks, and pulled out his wallet from it. He extracted an engraved portrait of U.S. Grant. “Here,” he said. “Throw this into the pot.”

“You don’t need to do that!” Louise had a touchy pride about making it on her own if she could. It sometimes bent—she’d touched Colin for money more than once when she was desperate. You did what you had to do, which wasn’t always what you wanted to do. She didn’t have to take money from Jared now.

He had pride of his own. Setting his thick glasses on his nose, he gave her a stern look. “Who said anything about needing to? I want to. You’re here because you feel like being with me for a while—at least, I hope that’s why you’re here. So why shouldn’t I chip in?”

After a moment’s thought, Louise decided arguing was a losing proposition. “Thanks,” she said, and stuck the fifty in her handbag.

Jared put on his clothes, too, so he could go to the door with her. He kissed her good-bye. “See you Monday,” he said. “Of course you know I’ll dock you if you’re late.”

“Of course,” she said seriously. She made her hands tremble. “Look—you can see how worried about it I am.” They both laughed. She swung onto her bike and pedaled away.

No stars in the sky: clouds covered them. With the power working, the streetlights were on. They did a much better job of warning her about bumps and potholes than her little headlight could. That was more to let other people know she was there than to show her the road ahead.

It was after eleven. Not many other people were on the road. An owl hooted from a tall tree. She never would have heard that if she were in a car. Off in the distance, a siren started to scream. Louise cocked her head, listening. Police car? No, an ambulance. Like any cop’s wife or ex-wife, she knew the difference in the notes. She hoped whoever was in it or whoever it was going for would be all right. For ordinary people getting around town, bicycles were okay. In an emergency, you still wanted internal combustion.

“Hey,” Marshall said when she walked into the condo.

“Hello,” she answered. “How’s James Henry?”

“Asleep.”

“I sort of had in mind when he was awake.”

“Oh, yeah.” He nodded, as if that hadn’t occurred to him. Louise tried to sniff without showing it. No, he hadn’t got baked. He was just being difficult. “He’s cool,” he said after another pause. “He, like, beat me a game of checkers.”

“Did he? How much help did he have?”

“Not enough for him to notice. Not as much as you’d think, either. He’s a sharp little guy.”

Louise already knew that. She didn’t mind other people noticing, though. Oh, no! She was smiling as she asked, “How’s Janine doing?”

Marshall hesitated. “She’s okay,” he said after that little stop-and-think.

“All right.” If Louise had felt nasty, she might have done some poking there. But she didn’t feel nasty; she was about as happy as she’d been since the day before the day Teo left her. So she asked, “And how about your little half-sister?”

“Deborah’s cool.” No hesitation there.

“All right,” Louise said again. She didn’t want Colin’s new child to be sick, or anything like that. Such vindictiveness wasn’t in her. If Deborah were homely, though, or bad-tempered, or stupid… Plainly, she wasn’t. Life would go on even so. Louise handed Marshall money. “Here’s some more you don’t have to tell Uncle Sam about.”

“Uncle Who?” he said as he stuck it in his pocket without looking at it. They exchanged knowing smiles, grownup smiles. You gave the government what you couldn’t help giving it. Anything more? You hung on to that. Louise was sometimes surprised her younger son by Colin—the kid who’d been her baby for so long but wasn’t any more—had got old enough to own a smile like that. But there you were.

And here she was.

And here Marshall wasn’t. “I’m gone,” he said, and out the door he went. Louise locked it behind him and worked the dead bolt. Yes, she was old enough that her onetime baby was no baby any more. Someone still liked her—loved her—just the same. It made a hell of a lot of difference.

• • •

Kelly puttered around the house on a Saturday morning. She’d hoped to spend it with Colin, but he’d had to go in to the station this morning. She couldn’t do a lot of the things she would have liked to do, because the power was down. When that happened once in a blue moon, it irked you every time it did. When you knew it could happen any old time, you worked around it—or you sat there cursing the darkness, which did you no good.

Okay. She couldn’t get online. Her cell had no bars. Even the landline was out—she checked. No TV, either. But she did have a battery-powered radio. Some local stations went on generator power during outages. And, with a lot of local stations off the air, she could pick up signals from ones farther away. Sometimes she could, anyhow. When the atmospherics were right.

She’d got Seattle once, in the middle of the night. Las Vegas, Phoenix, Albuquerque… They were all possible, but none guaranteed. San Diego stations came in better, but usually went off the air at the same time as their L.A. neighbors.

She clicked the digital station-changer, moving up ten kilocycles with every click. Here was bandera music, maybe from the Central Valley, heard through a waterfall of static. And here, a few clicks on, was the local news station, loud and clear. “We’ll stay with you till the generator runs dry,” the broadcaster said genially. “Or maybe the power will come back before then. In that case, we’ll stay with you till the lights go out again.”

He sounded resigned and amused at the same time. It wasn’t as if he’d never gone through this before. Everybody in SoCal had. There weren’t many places in the country any more where people hadn’t.

Sure enough, he went on, “Brownouts and power rationing continue as the Northeast tries to adjust to the loss of power from Quebec. In Boston, electricity is available from five a.m. to eight a.m. and from six p.m. to nine p.m. In New York City, the hours are six to eight a.m., eleven a.m. to one p.m., and seven p.m. to nine p.m. Philadelphia is the same as Boston. In Cleveland, the power comes on only between six and nine p.m. Consumers are anything but happy with the restrictions authorities have imposed.”