“How do you mean that?” she asked. “And how would you have tested them? Or don’t I want to know?”
“I was talking about their job performance,” Jared said primly. “Other things just happen. Or, more often, they don’t.”
“I’m glad they did this time.” Louise meant it. Having someone interested in you that way was a sign you were still alive. It was a sign you hadn’t disappeared, the way so many women over fifty seemed to. America often acted as if it wanted to push the disappearing age down to somewhere between thirty and thirty-five. That was insane, which didn’t keep it from happening.
“Now that you mention it, so am I.” Jared suddenly stiffened. “A customer!” He said it just the way Mrs. Lovett did in Sweeney Todd. That Louise knew he was doing Mrs. Lovett only showed she’d been hanging out with him for a while. People you hung out with rubbed off on you. You rubbed off on them, too. Louise sometimes heard bits of her own speech come back at her out of Jared’s mouth.
The bell over the door chimed when the customer came in. She was a woman near the age of disappearing Louise had been worrying about a moment before. Her face had seen some hard times. So had her raincoat, which must have been ancient long before the supervolcano eruption made her need it more. She closed her umbrella and stuck it in the bucket Jared had put by the door for days like this.
“Horrible out there!” she said. “Horrible!”
“It is, yes,” Jared replied. “Can we help you with anything?”
“Well, I hope you won’t get mad, but I just came in to get out of the rain for a little while,” the woman replied. Louise nodded to herself. If the gal had done business here, even once five years ago, Jared would have had a name to go with her harsh face. Louise didn’t know how he did it, but he did.
“Glad to be your oasis,” he said now. “Look around. If you want to spend a little money here while you dry out, we won’t mind.”
“No, huh?” the woman said.
“No. But we won’t mind—too much—if you don’t, either.”
“Okay.” She went over to the shelves of used books. She picked up a mystery, which didn’t surprise Louise, and a book about the Battle of Gettysburg, which did. And she picked up one of the gaudy ceramic whatsits that Jared kept selling and Louise couldn’t stand. Finally, almost as an afterthought, she got a bottle of aspirin.
Louise rang her up, took her money, and made change. She put everything in a plastic bag. “Keep the books dry,” she said.
“Uh-huh.” The woman nodded. “Wouldn’t be much left of ’em by the time I got home if you didn’t.” She managed a smile that didn’t quite reach her colorless gray eyes. “Now that I’ve made you both rich, I guess I can go back out in it.”
“Try to stay dry,” Louise said. “The two of us, we’ll head for Tahiti on what you just spent.”
“Don’t you wish! Don’t we all wish!” The woman took her umbrella out of the bucket, opened the door, unfurled the umbrella, and walked away. She hadn’t gone far before the swirling curtains of rain hid her.
“Tahiti? I do wish,” Jared said.
“Me, too. Who doesn’t?” Louise answered. “The really scary thing is, L.A. still has good weather, at least as far as the United States goes. In spite of that, it does.” She waved at the downpour outside.
“The good news is, you’re right. That’s only rain. It isn’t snow. We don’t get snow very often. We never get snow in July or anything like that. If there weren’t so many people living here, this would be wonderful farm country. It wouldn’t even need irrigation, the way it did before it filled up.” The pharmacist paused for effect. “And the bad news is, you’re right.”
“Yeah.” Louise sighed. “For anybody who remembers the way we used to be, this is pretty miserable. I feel sorry for James Henry and all the people who won’t grow up remembering what it was like before the eruption.”
“It’ll be water to a duck for them,” Jared answered. “Before too long, they’ll get old enough to call us a bunch of nostalgic fools. You always need to find some reason or other to think your parents are fools. That helps remind you how wonderful you are yourself.”
“Tell me about it!” Louise exclaimed. “I went through that with my kids by Colin. Now I get to look forward to a rerun when James Henry turns sixteen. Isn’t that wonderful?”
“Sooner or later, they’ll end up doing a musical about it,” Jared said.
“Sooner or later, they end up doing a musical about everything.” Louise could tease him about it, as long as she didn’t get mean.
“You’re right,” he said cheerfully. “But so what? That’s part of what makes them fun to begin with. I wonder if I’ll live long enough to see it.”
I wonder if I’ll live long enough to was a notion Louise hadn’t had till she passed fifty. Before then, time seemed to stretch like a rubber band. Of course she was going to last forever, to live happily ever after. Only she wasn’t. She wouldn’t. Nobody did, no matter how much everybody expected to or wanted to. She might have thirty or forty years left. She might not have thirty or forty minutes. If she fell over from a heart attack, if the next person who walked into the drugstore was a strung-out crackhead with a Glock…
You never knew, that was all. Colin had dodged his brush with the Grim Reaper this past summer, but why? Only by luck, as far as she could tell.
Jared started reciting poetry:
“‘Had we but world enough, and time,
This coyness, Lady, were no crime…
But at my back I always hear
Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.’”
Was he following his own train of thought or guessing hers from her expression? She remembered the poem from high school. The poet wanted to get laid, but his girlfriend wouldn’t give it up. More meaning behind it, though, than she’d imagined when she was seventeen. Tears stung her eyes.
You couldn’t live with men. Vanessa had proved that to herself to her full satisfaction—or dissatisfaction, depending on how you looked at things. When she was in high school, she’d been sure she would have Peter’s babies. As soon as she met Bryce, though, old Peter didn’t seem like so much of a much.
Bryce seemed okay… for a while. He was clumsy in bed, though—not that Peter’d been any too wonderful along those lines himself. And Bryce was horny all the damn time. When he wasn’t horny, he didn’t want to do anything except read or get into arguments on the Greek-history message boards (there were such things, no matter how perverse the notion seemed to Vanessa). He didn’t want to shop. He didn’t want to dance. She decided she was better off without him.
Which led to Hagop. He wasn’t horny all the time. One of the things that had interested her in him was that he was twice her age. Hagop certainly knew things about screwing that Bryce wouldn’t find out in a month of Sundays. But he was a self-centered bastard. He wanted her on his arm to show his fellow rug merchants what a stud he was.
If she hadn’t followed him to Denver like a fool, she wouldn’t have nearly died when the supervolcano blew. That Hagop almost certainly did die was some consolation—some, but not enough. Because getting out of Denver meant getting stuck in Camp Constitution.
You couldn’t live without men, but Vanessa could have lived forever without Micah Husak. In exchange for services rendered, he’d got her better quarters and less obnoxious tentmates. In exchange for services rendered, and for her self-respect. Millions of people remained stuck in resettlement camps all these years after the eruption, New Homestead Act or no New Homestead Act. Vanessa would have bet anything she had that Micah and other FEMA flunkies still had more than their share of women who did what they wanted.