“Yeah.” He let out the dry chuckle she remembered so well. “Watch that first step. It’s a doozy, I tell you.”
“I guess!” Louise said. “You weren’t the one who got him, then?”
“Oh, heck, no. I was out of it by then. I fired three rounds that didn’t do any good, and then he nailed me.”
“How long will they keep you here?”
“If everything goes okay, a few more days. They want to make sure I don’t have an infection in there. Then I have to heal up and see how the arm is. I can wiggle my fingers some. They say that’s good.”
“Has, uh, Deborah seen you since you got hurt?” Louise asked.
“I brought her for a few minutes this morning,” Kelly said. “She said this was a weird place and it smelled funny. But she was glad to see her daddy even so.”
“That’s good.” Louise nodded. “And this is a weird place, and it does smell funny.”
“Thanks for coming,” Colin told her. “Nice to know I’m still irresistible.”
“Oh, right. At least,” Kelly said before Louise could decide whether to laugh or get mad. Only the pitch of her voice differed from Colin’s; the inflection was his to a T. If that meant anything, odds were it meant they’d made a good match. While Louise had put up with what Colin called his sense of humor, she hadn’t tried to imitate it much.
A nurse came in and shooed Louise and Kelly out into the hall. Sweeping the curtain around the bed closed, she said, “One minute, ladies. I have to give him an injection.”
“I hope that’s his pain shot. I think it is,” Kelly said. “He’s hurting more than he lets on.”
“That sounds like him,” Louise replied.
The current and former Mrs. Ferguson eyed each other, looking for something to say. Kelly spoke first: “I do appreciate that you came. And so does Colin. You still mean something to him—I know that.”
“He means something to me, too,” Louise said. “We were together a long time. And it wasn’t a horrible divorce. I tried not to make it one, anyhow. I just… had to go in a different direction, that’s all.”
“I’ve got the car here,” Kelly said. “For this, I’ve been using it. When you go, do you want me to drive you to your place?”
“Thanks, but that’s okay,” Louise answered. Kelly didn’t try to insist. Now Louise had met her, but making friends or even owing her anything pushed it further than she wanted to go. She’d made her choices before the supervolcano erupted, and she’d stick with them.
XIX
Rob sometimes got mail from other people who lived in this cut-off chunk of Maine. There were occasional fan letters. Flounders, he and his bandmates called those, from the line in Rocky and Bullwinkle: “Fan mail… from a flounder.” There were also occasional invitations to play, sometimes even offering money or other interesting inducements.
Mail from the rest of the United States came rarely enough to make him open his eyes wide when it did. The last time he’d heard from his father was the letter letting him know he had a new half-sister. Dad had never been one for Christmas or even birthday cards. Idle chatter wasn’t his style, any more than it was Rob’s.
But here was another letter in his small, neat script. Here at last: by the California postmark, it had been a month on the road. The Pony Express could have got it here faster—unless the ponies died of HPO trying to cross what had been the Great Plains and was now the Great Eruption Zone. The stamp said FOREVER + 2 and SUPERVOLCANO RELIEF. That didn’t mean it was good forever and two days. It meant you paid first-class postage plus two bucks, and the two did what they could to help the cleanup.
Dear Rob, the letter said, I have joined your club, and if it weren’t for the honor of the thing I would rather walk. A punk with an AK put a round through my shoulder. Not the arm I eat and write and shake it off with, but even so not a whole bunch of fun. The punk is dead, and I don’t miss him a bit.
“I bet you don’t!” Rob said. Dad had never been one for wasting sentiment on crooks—few cops were—and he really wouldn’t waste any on somebody who’d come too close to punching his ticket for good.
So I am on the shelf right now, his father continued. I stay home and I get in Kelly’s way and I read Deborah stories. I make sure she sits on my right side so she doesn’t jostle the other shoulder. It may not matter. I’ve got plenty of plaster and fiberglass armor. I mostly sleep on my back on the recliner in my work niche.
“Ouch!” Rob exclaimed. He hadn’t thought about how awkward a cast there would make lying down or rolling over.
When the cast comes off, I will start going to physical therapy, Dad wrote. That is supposed to be even less fun than going to the dentist (Kelly’s father would kill me if he read this). The dentist numbs you up first. With the physical therapist, it’s supposed to hurt. But I need to do it if I’m going to get any use out of the arm. Some would be good.
“No shit,” Rob agreed aloud. The drummer in—was it Def Leppard?—had lost an arm in a car crash or something. He’d fixed up his kit so he could do amazing things with foot pedals, but it wasn’t the same. You came equipped with a right and a left for good reason.
I may need more surgery, too. Whether I do, and how much I get back, will all figure in to when I go back to work—and if I go back, Dad finished. I have more than enough time served to retire if I want to. That would be one thing. Retiring because I have to would be something else, something I don’t like so much. But I may not have a choice. Hope you are doing well. If you get close to e-mail or if you find a camera and film for it, send me photos of Lindsey and little Colin. I already know what you look like. Love anyway, Dad.
Rob read through it again, shaking his head. It sure as hell sounded like his old man, all right. And, knowing his father, he feared he knew how much Dad wasn’t saying. How bad did the wound hurt? How worried was Dad that he wouldn’t get back much function in the arm? Both ways, probably more than he was letting on.
Lindsey was at the high school. How much use for chemistry kids here would ever have was another interesting question. But this technically was still part of the USA. They might move to some place where knowing such things mattered. And going to school got them out of their parents’ hair for a while.
Little Colin would have been in Rob’s hair right this minute, since he was playing househusband. But the kid was down for a nap, so Rob could make like a grownup. Only there wasn’t much to do. No TV. No radio, not when he was low on batteries. No Net. It was quiet quiet quiet. He was trying to get his hands on a spring-powered record player and some records to play on it. That would, or at least might, be better than nothing.
Meanwhile… Meanwhile, it was as nice a day as Guilford had seen since the eruption. The sun shone. Much of the snow had melted. Grass and even a few flowers were trying to grow. It was in the fifties—beach weather, the way things were these days. It probably wouldn’t get down to forty tonight, either.
All over Guilford, people with vegetable plots and greenhouses would be cheering for the good weather to go on. The longer it did, the better the chance their vegetables had of maturing. Rob cheered for the good weather even though he didn’t have a plot. The more veggies there were, the better the odds of getting through the next grim winter would be.
When Maine north and west of the Interstate was just an amusing outlier, the rest of the country could afford to throw it a bone during the short stretch of time when the roads opened up. Now the whole Northeast was in trouble: the really densely populated part of the USA. Who would bother remembering the handful of people up here?