Sajelle had two children with DeWayne. Carolina and Jody had a son, Angel. Scott ran genome analyses on each child minutes after the birth. The results were always the same: the frontal lobe included the dense structure connected to the huge number of receptors in the nose. The genes were dominant. The babies would be able to smell information molecules, if anyone had been able to send them.
The genetically altered rice and hay flourished, although out of prudence Theresa insisted the entire crop be consumed on the farm rather than sold. Lillie was disappointed, but she managed production costs and quantities so well that the net savings to the farm was large. Lillie, and the others, turned sixteen, seventeen, twenty-one. Gradually Lillie began to share with Theresa and DeWayne the financial management of the farm, which Theresa had never enjoyed. The federal government resuscitated both itself and the income tax.
Lillie had grown lean, hard-bodied, briskly capable. She and Alex were the only two of the pribir kids who learned to ride. “Pribir kids” —it had been years since Theresa had thought that phrase. There was nothing about the farm that did not look and feel totally normal, except for the large number of children the same age. Everyone looked and acted no different from their neighbors.
Unless you counted Lillie’s attitude toward her children.
As the years rolled by, Theresa became more troubled by this. Lillie was kind to Cord, Keith, and Kella. It was the wary, impersonal kindness of a childless boarder. It reminded Theresa, as nothing else could, of the days at Andrews Air Force Base, when both she and Lillie had been on the receiving end of wary consideration from doctors and intelligence agents and security chiefs.
“It’s not right, Lillie. They need you.”
“I know it’s not right,” Lillie said with her habitual honesty. “But I can’t help it. Although they don’t need me while they have you and Carolina.”
“You’re their mother!”
“I know.”
“Cord, especially, needs you. Haven’t you seen how he follows you around, hoping for your attention?” Kella, Lillie’s daughter, had fastened herself onto Carolina. Keith seemed to have a temperament like Lillie’s, adventurous and self-sufficient. But the look in Cord’s eyes when they followed his mother tore at Theresa’s heart. The only time the little boy seemed happy was with Clari, Senni’s little girl. The two were inseparable. Just a few months apart in age, they shared secrets and games far more than did Cord and his siblings.
Lillie said, in a rare moment of overt emotion, “I can’t… can’t seem to love them, Tess.”
“Why the hell not?”
“I don’t know.”
Theresa gazed at Lillie. Theresa didn’t understand, wouldn’t ever understand. Cord—all the children—were beautiful, bright, good-natured. Sometimes Theresa felt guilty because she preferred Cord to her own blood granddaughter, Senni’s older girl, Dolly. Dolly was a whiner, and she had a selfish streak not shared by her younger sister, Clari. Cord was a wonderful child. How could Lillie not feel —
“I don’t know,” Lillie repeated and turned away, her face once more a composed, competent, pleasant mask.
CHAPTER 18
The drought began in the summer of 2064.
At first, no one worried. For years the climate in southeast New Mexico had been improving, increasingly favorable for agriculture, ranching, and shade trees. The farm barely needed to irrigate anymore. Theresa and her “farm co-op” had learned to take their good luck for granted. They were in the right place, during the right years. In the vast planetary climatic lottery, they’d drawn a winning number.
However, after the drought had continued for an entire year, Theresa began to get nervous. The farm had been sustained through the year by savings, by DeWayne, and by good management. But the herd had been reduced in size and the harvest was largely a failure. If the land began to revert to its former aridity, both water and plant life drying up, she would be ruined. There were too many people, too many cows, too much diverse activity to go back to what the farm had been twenty years ago.
It was the same in other places, but not everywhere. With mixed feelings Theresa heard on Net news that the northeast coast, that part of it not under water, continued to rise in productivity, population, and malaria. The Canadian plains also continued to enjoy its gains of the last decades. But the southwest, along with large portions of China, were shifting in weather yet again.
International tensions with China again worsened.
Let it be temporary, Theresa prayed to nothing. Not a dangerous shift, just a few bad years. Farmers and ranchers have always had bad years. Nothing new in that, nothing terrifying.
Jody and Spring decided to end the hog operation. Lillie, studying the figures, agreed. They also stopped growing the genetically altered rice. The creek was not delivering enough floodwater.
She was too old for this, Theresa thought. She and Scott and DeWayne, all sixty-four years old. Arthritis was starting to make it painful to turn her neck. She could no longer eat raw vegetables without stomach distress. She was too old to hunker down and then spring up to start over.
Autumn still didn’t bring rain. In December, Lillie’s children would turn eleven. Theresa decided to have a party. Everyone needed cheering up. She would hold a massive party for all fourteen kids on December 10, Cord’s birth date. The look in his eyes when they followed Lillie had changed. Wistfulness had been replaced by bewildered anger. Theresa was worried about him. He played, worked, and studied almost exclusively with Clari, his gentle shadow. She worshipped him, much to Senni’s annoyance.
“Let’s have party hats,” Julie said, from some memory at least a half century old. “I know how to fold them out of newspapers.”
“There aren’t any newspapers,” Sajelle pointed out.
“Well, any paper. And candles.”
“That we can get,” Theresa said, making a list. Lillie could go to Wenton and pick up the supplies for the party. It was probably the most involved Lillie would get.
“Carolina said she’d bake three of those Spanish cakes with the prickly-pear jelly inside,” Emily said. “They were soooooo good.”
“What about presents?” Bonnie said. “The same thing for everybody? Or each mother buys her own?”
“There shouldn’t be a large difference in cost, though,” Emily said, not looking at Sajelle, who thanks to DeWayne had so much more than the rest of them. Although Sajelle never flaunted it.
Bonnie said, “I heard Angie talk about a doll in Lucy Tertino’s store. Some woman in Wenton sews them by hand, with little outfits, too.”
Emily laughed. “Bonnie, your daughter is such a girly girl.”
Bonnie smiled. “You saying that’s ironic, Em?”
“Never.”
“I know!” Julie said. “Water balloons!”
Theresa listened to them plan, joke, enjoy, four young women of twenty-five, her school friends and contemporaries as she faced her sixty-fifth birthday. It would be a good party. And for a day at least, nobody would think about the drought. Maybe.
As the day grew closer, the children became frantic with excitement. Studies were neglected, chores left undone, sleep interrupted. Even obedient Clari forgot to water the winter herb garden because she was out playing with Cord, and after two days, when Theresa discovered this, the cooking herbs were nearly dead in their pots under the relentless sun.
“I’m sorry!” Clari sobbed, and Theresa wouldn’t have had the heart to punish her. But Senni did.