“Which means just about everybody,” Bryce put in.
“How right you are. And there’s a reason for that: LAUSD does stink. It’s great if you shuffle papers. But if you’re a student and you actually want to learn something. . I spent six years working at L.A. Unified. The nonsense you’ve got to put up with made me glad to take the cut that went with coming here. I can accomplish something here, you know?”
“That’d be nice.” Bryce wondered if he’d accomplished one single goddamn thing at the DWP. He’d kept a roof over his head and food on his table. In the larger scheme of things? Not so you’d notice.
He talked things over with Susan that night. They ate at a Chinese seafood place a couple of miles from his apartment. That was the kind of thing people used their cars for these days. “Whatever you want to do is fine with me,” she said. “Money. . If I worried about money, would I be messing around with the Hohenstaufens?”
The Western medieval world was a lot closer in time to the here and now than Bryce’s period was. In attitude? He doubted it. The Hellenistic Greeks could seem amazingly modern-and amazingly cynical. Of course, from what Susan said, so could Frederick II. But the Holy Roman Emperor spectacularly didn’t fit into his own time. Chances were he would have been right at home amongst the clever cutthroats who ruled Ptolemaic Egypt, Seleucid Syria, and Antigonid Macedonia.
Their food came. Seafood was local. Next to beef or lamb or chicken, it was also a bargain. People screamed about that all the time. They wanted Washington to Do Something. They wanted it louder every day, too. Just what Washington could do, they didn’t seem so sure. Retroactively declare the supervolcano hadn’t erupted, maybe.
People like that probably ordered unscrambled eggs when they sat down to breakfast at Denny’s, too.
All of which was beside the point. Bryce swallowed a tiny squid braised in hoisin sauce and came to the point: “If I take the job, looks like I’ll have to move up to the Valley. Will you come up there with me?”
“Live with you, you mean?” she asked. A squid of her own paused halfway between her plate and her mouth. She frowned a little; a vertical crease formed between her eyebrows. They never had lived together-she was old-fashioned about that. She’d spend the night at his place, and let him spend it at hers, but no more.
Bryce nodded, anyhow. “Uh-huh. It’s no farther to UCLA from there than it is from the South Bay. Closer, I think.”
She ate her squid. Then she said, “I don’t know,” in a way that told him she did know but was still looking for a way to soften the blow.
He took a deep breath. “It’d be okay if we got married, right?” He’d figured he would propose to her one of these days. He hadn’t figured this would be the one. Sometimes his mouth lived a life of its own, wild and free.
By the way Susan’s eyes widened, she hadn’t figured this would be the day, either. “Are you sure?” she asked.
Weren’t women trained not to give men a second chance when they popped the question? But if Bryce said he wasn’t sure now, they were finished. He nodded. “You bet I am.” He meant it, too. “Even if it means telling your dad I proposed at the same time as I was talking about taking a job that didn’t pay so well.”
“Could be worse. You might not have a job at all-plenty of academics these days don’t. Pop would really love that.” Susan paused, as if remembering she hadn’t answered the relevant question. She took care of that: “Yes, I’ll marry you, Bryce. You can even invite Lieutenant Ferguson if you want to-but not Vanessa, thank you very much.”
Not inviting Colin to his wedding had never occurred to Bryce. Neither had inviting Vanessa, even if she were in this part of the country. Had he been rash enough to invite her, he knew she would have said no. Actually, chances were she would have told him to fuck off and die. Once Vanessa was through with somebody, she was through with him. Forever and twenty minutes longer.
But thinking about one girl when he’d just successfully proposed to another one wasn’t the smartest thing he could do, even if Susan had been the one to bring up Vanessa. He reached across the table and took her hand. “I love you, you know,” he said. “The best I can.”
She nodded. “I know,” she said, accepting the qualification. “And I know that if you keep working for the DWP much longer, you’ll go right out of your tree. So if Junipero calls and tells you they want to teach their kids Latin, you do it, you hear?”
Bryce sketched a salute. “Yes, ma’am!”
Susan stuck her tongue out at him. “Just don’t let your eyeballs stick out on stalks when you stare at the cute ones.”
She tried to sound severe, but he knew she was kidding.
They went back to his apartment. He did his best to show where she satisfied his appetites. By all the signs, he satisfied hers, too. And wasn’t that the point of the happy exercise?
Vic Moretti called back five days later. He considerately waited till Bryce was home from the DWP. “You want the position, it’s yours,” he said without preamble.
“I want it,” Bryce said.
“You sure you know what you’re getting into?” Moretti asked. Maybe he was joking, and then again maybe he wasn’t.
Bryce didn’t care. . too much. “I know what I’m getting out of,” he replied.
Moretti paused. “Yeah, that counts, too,” he agreed thoughtfully. “Well, semester’s starting soon. It’s good to have the slot filled.”
“Good to fill it.” Bryce wondered whether he’d mean that five years-or even five weeks-from now.
* * *
James Henry Ferguson sneezed. Yellowish snot leaked from his right nostril. Dried, crusted boogers clogged the left one. He coughed and almost choked, but then didn’t quite.
“You poor thing,” Louise said. If anything was more pathetic than a sick baby, she had no idea what it could be. James Henry didn’t know what was wrong with him. He didn’t know he’d be okay again in a couple-three days. He didn’t know what a couple-three days were, or how to wait them out. All he knew was that he felt crappy.
“Mama!” he said, and started to bawl. That did nothing to improve the situation. His eyes leaked tears. His snot got runnier, which meant it oozed from both nostrils. Looked at objectively, he made a most uninspiring spectacle.
Louise wasn’t objective-nowhere close. Mothers weren’t equipped to be. If they had been, the human race would have died out long before it ever escaped from the caves.
Colin, now. . She remembered Colin surveying a sick kid-had it been Rob or Marshall? why couldn’t she remember? — and going, “Boy, he’s an ugly little son of a gun, isn’t he?” She remembered the clinical interest in his voice, and how much it had infuriated her.
If she’d been in touch with her feelings then, she would have walked away from the marriage on the spot. And if she had, her life now would sure as hell be different. Better? Worse? She hadn’t a clue. Different she was sure of.
The other thing she was sure of was that the OTC meds she was stuffing into James Henry weren’t worth shit. She was definitely in touch with her feelings about that. It made her mad, was what it did. Back when her other kids were little, you could buy stuff that actually made snot dry up. Sure, it’d come back as soon as the dose wore off, but it went away for a while.
No more, dammit. The FDA, in its infinite wisdom, had decided that the drugs that helped most kids also messed up fourteen in a million, or whatever the hell the number was. And so, to keep the fourteen in a million safe, the other 999,986 sniffled for a solid week whenever they caught a cold.
And they did catch them. Boy, did they ever! Babies and colds went together like ham and eggs. All the cold medicines on the drugstore shelves looked pretty much the way they had back when Louise was taking care of Rob and Vanessa and Marshall. Their boxes said things like SAFER THAN EVER! What that meant was, they didn’t do squat.