“Thanks, Professor,” Rob said, and then, not quite apropos of nothing, “I like it here!”
“You must. Otherwise, you would have bailed out as soon as the runways at Bangor or Portland thawed out enough to let planes land and take off,” Dick Barber said. “You. Y’all. Youse guys. You and Biff and Justin and Charlie. All of you.”
“I understood you,” Rob said. “We’ll always be outsiders—”
“Like me,” Barber broke in.
“Yeah, like you.” Rob nodded. “But it’s okay. The people whose people have lived here since Maine was part of Massachusetts, like Bill Gagne in Greenville, they let you talk at meetings and everything.”
“Then they call him an idiot,” Jim Farrell put in.
“Hey, I didn’t know Maine was part of Massachusetts once before I got here,” Rob said.
“Well, I am an idiot sometimes. Sometimes I’m not, too, though, and they see that.” Barber eyed Rob. “Sometimes even you’re not.”
“Maybe sometimes,” Rob allowed. Another kitten wanted to climb him. He picked it up, put it on his lap, and started petting it. He’d never dreamt Guilford, Maine, would end up his favorite spot in the whole wide world, but there you were. And here he was.
Marshall took another sheet out of the typewriter and eyed it. The ribbon was starting to go. The next time he had power, he needed to order a new one online. Editors had eased up on typewritten submissions. That started to happen pretty soon after the eruption, but gathered steam after the big outages in the Northeast. They did insist on black copy, though, for best results when they scanned to OCR.
I can get a few more pages out of this one, anyhow, Marshall thought. He fed a fresh sheet of paper into the old portable. By now, he’d got used to it. It wasn’t user-friendly, not the way a computer was. He had to think things through before he set words to paper. Sometimes he fiddled around in longhand till he got his sentences the way he wanted, and then transcribed them. But he could use the typewriter to do what he needed.
Tap, tap, tappety-tap. He had the touch down now. And he was getting close to twenty thousand words into what might turn out to be a novel. If it did, when it did, he intended to dedicate it to Kelly. How many stepmoms got a novel dedicated to them? She was a character in the book, too, renamed and (he hoped) suitably disguised.
After he took out the next page, he looked at his watch. Like a lot of people his age, he’d started wearing one when his phone wouldn’t reliably give him the time. “Shit!” he said. It was later than he’d thought.
He filled a pot with water. A match got a burner on the stove going. He cut up potatoes, carrots, and onions, and then a chunk of pork shoulder. They all went into the pot, along with salt, pepper, some other spices, and a bay leaf. The pot went onto the stove. He put the lid on it. In a couple of hours, it would be pork stew.
Pork. Chicken. Chicken. Pork. Fish (or sometimes squid). Pork. Chicken. Chicken. Pork. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d eaten beef. McDonald’s and Burger King sold so many pork patties these days, they’d had Muslims and Orthodox Jews picket them. Lamb? Marshall sighed. Lamb had been too goddamn expensive since long before the eruption.
Back to the typewriter. The real world receded in favor of the world inside his head. He looked up in surprise when Janine’s key chunked in the lock. He also looked up in surprise because it was getting dark. He could still see the words he was putting on paper. Past that, he hadn’t cared about anything. He was lucky he’d remembered to get the stew going.
He stood up and kissed Janine. “Hey, babe,” he said, sounding more like his father than he knew. “How’d it go?”
“I looked stuff up,” she answered. “I filled out some forms that don’t need lawyers. I interviewed a little old lady who may have been allergic to an antibiotic her doctor prescribed for her. She’s trying to decide whether to sue him. The firm is trying to decide whether to take the case if she does. Another exciting day in the life of a paralegal.”
“Right,” he said, and lit a kerosene lantern. All over L.A., people were doing the same thing. If the Big One chose this moment to hit, a million lanterns would fall over and a million fires would start. It would be like San Francisco in 1906, only more spread out.
“Stew smells good,” she said, sniffing. She sounded as if she deserved part credit, and she did: it was her recipe. After the sniff, she asked, “What else did you do?”
“Couple thousand words,” he said, not without pride. “It’s starting to feel like it’s going somewhere.” He’d approached it with… fear was the right word. He wasn’t some teenager, who might plunge into a novel and finish because he didn’t know how hard it was. He knew, all right. Maybe he knew too well.
“Okay.” Janine didn’t read a lot for fun. She read more now than she had before the supervolcano blew. Everybody did, because less in the way of other kinds of entertainment was around. But she still didn’t read all that much, not like Marshall. She went on, “When are you gonna see if you can sell it?”
“Two or three more chapters,” he answered. “I should have enough then to see if I can get an agent interested.”
She started to say something, then let it go. She looked under the lid on the pot instead. She stirred with a serving spoon. “It’s coming along,” she said. “Do we have any wine in the icebox?”
Another old word reviving with the thing so many refrigerators had turned back into. Rob pulled out a bottle of Chablis. He poured for both of them. He’d done his duty on the work front. A little buzz would be nice. The wine would go with the stew, too.
He wouldn’t crack Iron Chef any time soon, but dinner turned out fine. They killed the bottle of wine. Marshall wondered if Janine was drinking herself into the mood. Kerosene lanterns made lousy reading lamps. The most fun you could have with the power off, you made in pairs. It was also the most fun you could have with the power on, but it had less competition now.
But that turned out not to be why Janine was nerving herself. Instead of doing dishes, she said, “Marshall, this isn’t working out. You’re not bringing in enough money to make us go, and all you do is sit and pound that typewriter. You don’t have enough ambition.”
“What? Being a writer isn’t an ambition?” he said, because he knew too well he had no comeback for the other.
“Not when it doesn’t make you anything, and it doesn’t,” she answered. “And I was hoping for more, well, excitement when I told Paul to hit the road. Coming home to somebody who hardly even notices I was gone doesn’t cut it.”
“So what do you want me to do? Pack up and leave?” he asked, hoping against hope she’d tell him no.
But she nodded briskly. “Yes, that’s about it. Oh, you don’t have to clear out of here by tomorrow morning or anything. I know it’s not simple without a working car. It isn’t like you don’t have anywhere to go, though.”
Back to the old house—again, he thought unhappily. “And how long till somebody else moves in here?” he asked. He was just being snarky—if she was out looking for that somebody else, he had no clue about it.
Or he hadn’t had a clue about it till her jaw dropped. Even by lantern light, he thought she turned red, but it might have been his imagination. The other damn well wasn’t. “That’s got nothing to do with anything,” she said, her voice a little shrill.