Vanessa glanced at her watch. A quarter to seven, plus or minus a few minutes—he ought to be on his way now. The watch was a windup job she’d taken for herself while scavenging in Kansas for the Feds. It might not keep perfect time, but it didn’t need a battery or a signal from the outside to work.
Like manual typewriters, windup watches were popular again. Unlike manual typewriters—Vanessa thought of Marshall’s annoying monster—windup watches weren’t annoying… except when you forgot to wind one and it lied to you about the time. That usually happened just when you most needed the truth, of course.
Footsteps on the stairs. Heavy footsteps. Bronislav was a big man. He could move quiet as a cat. He’d learned how in the fighting in Bosnia-Herzegovina. “Learn or die,” he’d said. Most of the time, though, he didn’t bother. This was America, where he didn’t have to sneak.
That might not be him, of course. The apartment building had a secured entrance, sure. With the power out at least half the time, though, it just stood open. So did most buildings’ security doors. Burglaries were way up.
A knock on the door. Four knocks on the door, in fact: one for each C/S in the Serbs’ patriotic motto. Vanessa’s heart leaped. Before she opened up, though, she peered through the little spy-eye in the door. Yes, that was Bronislav. He had a newspaper-wrapped package under one arm.
After a hug that stamped her against him, a fierce kiss, and murmured endearments in English and Serbian (he liked her learning bits and pieces of his language, even if the way she pronounced it could make him LOL), he set the package on her kitchen counter.
Blood leaked through the newspaper here and there. “What is it?” Vanessa asked eagerly. He was a good cook, a better cook than she was. And truckers got things and swapped things that didn’t show up on their official cargo manifests. Americans didn’t call the informal economy a black market, which didn’t mean it wasn’t one.
“Croat spareribs,” he answered, deadpan. For a split second, she wondered if he meant it. Then he let out a harsh chuckle. “No, is not what you call long pig. Is only ordinary pig. I hear long pig and ordinary pig taste a lot alike. I hear, but I do not know of myself—for myself.”
“Where did you hear that?” Vanessa did her best to make a joke of it.
But Bronislav wasn’t joking. Or he didn’t sound as if he were, anyhow. His voice was serious, even grim, as he answered, “In Yugoslavia, I knew people who could say because they did it. They said they did it, anyhow. Me, I believed them. People on the other side did it, too—oh, yes. Ethnic cleansing.” He mimed picking his teeth.
“Gross!” Vanessa exclaimed. She hadn’t thought she’d lived a sheltered life till she met him. She still wasn’t sure how much to believe from his stories. If they were even a quarter true, though, a pretty good first draft of hell on earth had shown up in disintegrating Yugoslavia in the last decade of the last millennium.
“Too many things are,” he said. The depth of sorrow in his dark eyes kept her from pushing him any more.
Instead, she asked, “What will you do with them?” She assumed he would fix them. She hoped he would, in fact. She appreciated what he did with food without worrying about matching it.
“You have prunes, yes?” he said. “And onions? And chilies?”
“Sure,” she said. Onions she probably would have had anyway. The other ingredients she kept around because he liked them and used them. They wouldn’t have been on the pantry’s shelves if she’d been hanging out with someone who had different tastes.
“Good.” His nod was all business. “I use pressure cooker, then. I get things done fast.”
“Okay,” Vanessa said as he fell to work. She also might not have had the olive oil in which he browned the ribs if she hadn’t known him. She’d always thought it tasted medicinal. She didn’t any more. That might have been love, or it might just have been better olive oil.
A wonderful smell filled the apartment. Bronislav grunted in satisfaction. “Now we are getting somewhere.”
“When I had Pickles and I was making something that smelled good like this, he’d come in and try to scrounge.” Vanessa sighed. “I miss Pickles.”
“I am confused.” Bronislav sure sounded confused.
“Oh.” Vanessa explained: “Pickles was my cat. When I got to a shelter in Kansas right after the supervolcano, they made me turn him loose. He couldn’t have lasted long, poor thing, not with all the ash and dust coming down.”
“That is hard,” Bronislav said. “Why do you not get another cat? I have seen some people in this building have them.”
“I thought about it. I couldn’t stand it,” Vanessa answered. “What happens if—no, when—I have to do something horrible to this one, too?”
“You mourn. Then you go on. What else can you do? Sometimes life is hard. Always, in the end, life is hard. No one except our Lord ever got out of life alive. So do best you can while you are here.”
Vanessa didn’t believe Jesus had got out of life alive, either, not the way Bronislav did. She did believe avoiding pain was better than charging it head-on. Bronislav had a different opinion. They didn’t argue about it. He rarely argued, which made him as different from Bryce as dim sum were from doorknobs. He knew what he knew (not all of what he knew was true, but he didn’t give a rat’s ass about that). And he didn’t much care what you imagined you knew.
He put the lid on the pressure cooker and twisted it to seal it. Pretty soon, the steam-release valve in the lid started hissing away—chuff, chuff, chuff! Every chuff smelled great.
Pork ribs with prunes and chopped onions weren’t something Vanessa would have come up with on her own. Bronislav waved her praise aside. “It is home cooking for me,” he said. “My mother would have got angry because I do not have all my spices just right.”
By just right, he no doubt meant exactly the way his mother and grandmother and great-grandmother and all his female ancestors for the past thousand years had fixed the dish. He was still a part of that ancient tradition, still involved in keeping it alive. Vanessa envied the rootedness that gave him. Nothing in her own life reached back further than the stuff her mother had told her when she was little.
She said so. Bronislav looked at her with those eyes out of a church mosaic. “You are American. That is how things are for you. I am Serb. This is how things are for me.”
“But I don’t want things to be like that!” she blurted.
“Life is not about how we want things to be. Life is about how things are.” He sounded certain. He almost always did. After a moment, he went on, “I want things to be so I can open little restaurant, even if my spices in things are not just right every time. But I have not got money to do this. So I do not worry. Maybe one day I have money. Maybe I keep driving truck.”
“Okay, sweetie.” She put the dishes in the sink. Sooner or later, she’d do them. Odds were on later. She sent him a sidelong glance. “You aren’t driving a truck right now.”
The look he gave back said that, if she were a Serb, she would have been a slut. Since she was an American, he could make certain allowances. He got up and slipped a strong arm around her waist. They walked back to the bedroom together.
When everything worked right, Kelly Ferguson could sic one of the world’s most potent computer networks on the climate changes and resulting ecological changes the supervolcano eruption was creating. She sometimes thought, though, that it preferred to remain a creature of mystery. One of its more obnoxious changes was playing merry hell with the North American power grid. Things didn’t work right nearly so often as she wished they would.
When they didn’t—and when she wasn’t riding herd on Deborah, which also ate ridiculous amounts of time—she used what workarounds she could. She had a good scientific calculator. It ran on batteries. Its electronic brain was smarter and faster (and probably cuter, too) than a PC would have been a generation earlier. Next to the computer network she couldn’t access at the moment, however, it might as well have been a retarded hamster.