Vanessa’s temper cooled almost as fast as it had kindled. That he liked the piece so much helped to relax her. Right this minute, she was sure he liked it better than she did.
“Since you are awake, I will make for us breakfast,” Bronislav said.
“Okay!” Vanessa knew she sounded eager. With reason—she was. He could do outstanding things—amazing things—with the junk in her icebox. They might not be illegal or immoral, but they were sure as hell fattening. She didn’t care even a little bit. They were also delicious.
This time, he got dressed before he went into the kitchen. He’d be messing around with hot grease, after all. Spatters could get you in some of the most unkindest places if you let them.
Vanessa lay in bed for a few minutes, listening to the sounds of cookery. Listening to someone else cook was a lot more fun than doing it yourself. When savory smells started wafting back to the bedroom, she got up, put on a thick terrycloth robe, and went out to see what kind of magic Bronislav was working this morning.
It involved an egg or two, torn-up bread, a little bit (only a little bit, for flavor) of sausage, some leftover veggies, and spices in the pantry she’d forgotten she had. “What do they call this in Serbian?” she asked when she could stop inhaling it.
“I don’t know.” His powerful shoulders rose and fell in a shrug. “It is not Serb dish. Oh, maybe spices are Serb-style, but it is just what I do with what I find. I hope you do not get mad, but is poor-people food. It stretches what you have as far as it can.”
“I’m not mad. It’s great!” Vanessa tried to stretch what she had as far as she could, too. Food didn’t turn out so tasty when she cooked, though. She got her attitude toward cooking from her mother, she supposed. And Louise Ferguson never aimed any higher than Well, let’s get it over with. Vanessa went on, “You really ought to open up your restaurant. The place’d be packed, and they could roll the customers out after they got done, ’cause everybody’d be round as a bowling ball.”
Bronislav’s long face seemed mournful even when he was happy. Now he looked like a bearded Mask of Tragedy. “I want to try this. I am sick of driving truck back and forth, back and forth. But what can I do?” He spread his hands, both hard palms up. “I have not money to open restaurant. Not close, even.”
That might have been a hint. Vanessa realized as much. If she’d had more money herself, she would have thought about helping to back him. But she was still trying to climb out of the hole the supervolcano had dug for her. Everything she’d owned before the eruption was buried in ash in Denver—except for her poor cat, who’d surely died in Garden City, Kansas. She had to regather the Stuff that made a life: an old end table here, the secondhand laptop there, some used books somewhere else. She saved when she could—at a bank with a nationwide presence, not a crappy little local credit union like the Colorado one that had vanished and taken her funds with its dead computers—but she still lived from paycheck to paycheck a lot of the time. Bronislav’s poor-people food rang a painful bell with her.
When she didn’t say she’d fork over a few thousand smackers, he sighed. “Maybe one of these days. Maybe one of these years,” he said. “I look for chance. I look for money. Could be I find it.”
“I hope you do.” Vanessa wouldn’t have minded marrying him and helping make a go of a restaurant. She supposed it would involve moving down to San Pedro, which had the largest concentration of people from the ex-Yugoslavia. Well, that might not be so bad. It wasn’t as if she were too close to her mother, or to her father and his obnoxious new wife and brat, or to the little brother who had the gall to sell things.
One sign she was serious about Bronislav was that she washed dishes after breakfast. She hated washing dishes. Sometimes they piled up in the sink till they started getting stinky and she had to do something about them. But Bronislav was grimly neat, in the way some veterans were (Dad had a bit of the same disease). The hurt look in his eyes when he saw a mess got her moving better than a top sergeant’s chewing-out could have.
When the power was on, and when the gas was, the apartment building had hot water. Doing the dishes with it was easier than without it. And, after the dishes got done, she and Bronislav took long, lazy showers—Hollywood showers, her father would have called them. Once the showers were finished, they found something else to do with their morning together.
Another winter in Guilford. Every one seemed harder to get through than the one before it. As far as Rob Ferguson could tell, every one was harder to get through than the one before. They kept on getting colder, something he wouldn’t have imagined possible after the first couple. And moose on the hoof and pines in the ground got scarcer and farther away every year.
Things would have been even more rugged if people hadn’t kept giving up and moving south. Maine north and west of the Interstate probably couldn’t still support the population that had lived here when the supervolcano went. But a lot of those people had gone, too. The new winters wore down even Mainers. And some people froze to death every winter, too.
“People shouldn’t freeze here, dammit,” Dick Barber said at a town meeting after such an unfortunate family had been found. “Back when there was a Red Army, they taught their men to get through a Russian winter night in the woods with only the greatcoat on their back—no fire or anything. If they could do it then, we should be able to do it now in our own houses.”
Plenty of people in Guilford wore surplus greatcoats from the former Soviet Union and the countries of the late Warsaw Pact. They weren’t new, but they were cheap and warm—a good combination. Barber had one, and often used it.
He was universally noticed in town, but not universally beloved. Like Rob’s father, he had a habit of saying what was on his mind and letting other people pick up the pieces—or go after him with a two-by-four. One of his unadmirers called, “Do you know how to pull this stunt yourself, or are you just blowing hot air again?”
“Dave, if I could reliably blow hot air, I’d be the most popular man this side of the Interstate,” Barber answered, which got enough of a laugh to make Mayor McCann rap for order from the pulpit of the Episcopal church. When order returned, the proprietor of the Trebor Mansion Inn went on, “Since I’m not, I probably don’t. But I’ve read about how to do it, so I suppose I know.”
Dave ran a junk shop, which made him both literally and metaphorically a man of parts in Guilford these days. He was lean and graying, with a blade of a nose. “Ayuh,” he said, which meant he’d been born in these parts. “Then you won’t mind doin’ it for real, to show folks you mebbe for once know what you’re goin’ on—and on, and on—about.”
Several expressions chased one another across Dick Barber’s face. None of them seemed what you’d call happy. Rob could see why. If he said he didn’t want to do it, who would take him seriously after that? If he tried and failed, the Trebor Mansion Inn would be under new management.
But his voice showed none of what he had to be thinking. All he said was, “You’ll allow me a fur hat, too? The Ivans have them as part of their winter uniform—which probably means they wear them year-round these days.” Guilford did a good impersonation of Siberia these days. What Siberia was like… It’s, like, cold, man, Rob thought.
“You can wear a fur hat. You can wear your warm boots, too,” Dave said. He seemed amazed Barber had taken his dare with so little fuss. “You sure you know what you’re doin’, Dick?”