Richard, dear darling Richard, had grumblingly procured six dozen eggs by helicopter from Semi-Free Pennsylvania by the time she returned. He had been obliged to shout through a megaphone first, while the helicopter hovered at a safe distance, he said, before the farmer in question set his shotgun down.
“As for the milk,” he said, “you’re on your own. Try Kenya?”
“If the bacteria in a New York egg would kill Mim,” Clarissa said, “milk from a Kenyan cow—”
“You’re right. You sure a dairy substitute—”
“Know how much I paid for the vanilla beans?”
She told him. He whistled. “You’re right. No substitutes. Not for this. But—”
Clarissa said, “What about Switzerland?”
“There’s nothing of Switzerland left.”
“There are tons of mountains,” Clarissa said. “I used to ski them as a girl. Didn’t your family ski?”
“We preferred Aspen.”
“Then how do you know there’s not a cow hiding somewhere?”
“They used dirty bombs in the Four Banks’ War. Anything that survived will be radioactive.”
“I didn’t know about the dirty bombs.”
“It was kept out of the news. A bad look.”
“Then how—”
“Risk analysts in cryptofinance hear all kinds of unreported things.”
The curl of his hair seemed especially indulgent, his smile soft and knowledgeable. She worried the glass bead on its chain.
“I’ll ask around,” Clarissa said. “Someone must know. I’ve heard rumors of skyr, of butter—even cheese—”
“Doesn’t mean there’s a pristine cow out there. Be careful. People die for a nibble of cheese. I’ll never forgive you if you poison my mother.”
“You wait,” Clarissa said. “We’ll find a cow.”
Because the ice cream would be a coup d’état, in one fell swoop staking her social territory, plastering her brand across gossip sites, and launching the battleship of her marriage, Clarissa was reluctant to ask widely for help. It was her life’s work, just as it had been her Mim’s, to make the effortful appear effortless. Sweating and scrambling across Venezuelan mesas in search of cows would rather spoil the desired effect.
So she approached Lindsey, a college roommate, now her maid of honor, who was more family than friend, anyhow. Lindsey squinted her eyes and said she recalled a rumor of feral milkmaids in Unincorporated Oregon.
Rumor or not, it was worth following. Clarissa found the alumni email of a journalist, was passed on to a second, then a third. Finally she established that indeed, if one ventured east of the smallpox zone that stretched from Portland to Eugene, one might, with extraordinary luck, discover a reclusive family in Deschutes that owned cows three generations clean. But no one had seen any of them in months.
“You’re, what do you call it, a stringer, right? For the Portland Post-Intelligencer? Independent contractor, 1099? Well, what do you say to doing a small job for me? I’ll pay all expenses—hotels, private drone—plus a per diem, and you’ll get a story out of it. I just need fifteen gallons, that’s all.”
Icebox trains still clanked across the country over miles of decaying railbeds, hauled by tractors across gaps where rails were bent or sleepers rotted though, before being threaded onto the next good section. Their cars carried organ donations, blood, plasma, cadavers for burial or dissection, and a choice selection of coastal foods: flash-frozen Atlantic salmon fished from the Pacific, of the best grade, with the usual number of eyes; oysters from a secret Oregon bed that produced no more than three dozen a year; New York pizza, prepared with street mozzarella, for the daredevil rich in San Francisco; and Boston clam chowder without milk, cream, or clams. Her enterprising journalist added fifteen gallons of Deschutes milk in jerry cans to the latest shipment. Clarissa gnawed one thumbnail to the quick while she waited for the jerry cans to arrive.
Arrive they did, along with unconscionable quantities of sugar.
All that was left was the churning. Here Lindsey and three other bridesmaids proved the value of their friendship beyond any doubt, producing batch after creamy batch of happiness. Two days before the wedding, they had sculpted a moon of vanilla ice cream, complete with craters and silver robot-shaped scoop.
Ninety people, almost everyone who mattered, attended the wedding. The priest, one of six available for the chapel, still healthy and possessed of his hair and teeth, beamed out of the small projector.
“I promise to be your loving wife and moon maiden,” Clarissa said.
“I promise to be the best husband you could wish for, and the best father anyone could hope, for the three or four or however many children we have.”
“Three?” Clarissa said faintly. “Four?” But like a runaway train, her vows rattled forward. “I promise—”
Afterwards they mingled and ate. Then the moon was brought out to exclamations, camera flashes, and applause. The ice cream scoop excavated the craters far faster than the real robotic sifter could have.
Clarissa, triumphant, whirled from table to table on Richard’s arm.
“Know what’s etched on the robot?” she said. Clarissa O. Bell and Richard H. Laverton III forever.
“So virtual,” Monica said. “I’d kill for a man like that.”
“For what that cost,” Richard said, “we could have treated all of New York for hep C, or bought enough epinephrine to supply the whole state. But some things are simply beyond price. The look in Clarissa’s eyes—”
Glass shattered behind them. A dark-faced woman wearing the black, monogrammed uniform of the caterers Clarissa’s Mim had hired swept up the shards with her bare hands.
“Sorry,” the woman said, “I’ll clean it up. Please, ignore me, enjoy yourselves—”
“Are you crying?” Clarissa said, astounded. “At my wedding?”
“No, no,” the woman said. “These are tears of happiness. For you.”
“You must tell me,” Clarissa said, the lights of the room soft on her skin, glowing in the green glass around her neck. The bulbs were incandescent, selected by hand for the way they lit the folds of her lace and silk.
“It’s nothing. Really, nothing. A death in the family. That’s all.”
“That’s terrible. Here, leave that glass alone. This’ll make you feel much better.”
She scooped a generous ball of ice cream into a crystal bowl, added a teaspoon, and handed the whole thing over.
“Thank you so much,” the woman said. This time, Clarissa was sure, her tears were purely of joy.
Another server came over with dustpan and brush and swept the glass shards up in silence.
Clarissa began to serve herself a second bowl of ice cream as well, so the woman would not feel alone, but Richard took the scoop from her hand and finished it for her.
His cornflower eyes crinkling, he said, “You made everyone feel wonderful. Even my mother. Even Mel. Even that poor woman. You’re a walking counterargument for empathy decay.”
“What’s—”
“Some researchers think you can’t be both rich and kind. Marxist, anarchist nonsense. They should meet you.”
The ice cream was sweet, so very sweet, and cold. Clarissa shivered for a moment, closing her eyes. For a moment her future flashed perfectly clear upon her, link by silver link: how a new glass drop would be added to her chain for each child, Chelsea and Charles and Nick; how Richard would change, growing strange and mysterious to her, though no less lovable, never, no less beloved; how she would set aside her childish dreams of saving the world, and devote herself to keeping a light burning for her family, while all around them the world went dark.