Colin, on the other hand, was getting to the point where he wanted things to stay the way they were for as long as they could. When you saw sixty looming ahead like a giant pothole in the road, all the changes ran in the wrong direction. You got older. You got creakier. You saw your father-in-law the dentist more often, and for more horrible things. He’d retire for real pretty soon, and you’d go see some kid instead.
He turned right off Braxton Bragg and on to the street where he lived. A few blocks later, he turned in to his driveway. He stopped the car and killed the motor. “We’re home,” he announced.
“Yay!” Deborah said. Colin couldn’t have put it better himself.
Louise Ferguson walked into the Carrows on Reynoso Drive to have lunch with Vanessa. Marshall was babysitting for James Henry. That would cost more than the lunch did. If he’d known why Louise wanted him to keep an eye on his half-brother, he might not have come at all. He didn’t go out of his way for anything that had to do with his older sister.
As the hostess led her to a table, Louise wondered why she kept coming to this Carrows. She’d had some seriously unpleasant lunches here with Vanessa and with Colin. Habit, she supposed. She’d been coming here since long before the eruption, since the days when she was still married to Colin. And the food was never too bad or too expensive. You could do worse.
She might have known the server would put her at the table where she’d sat with Colin when she had to tell him she was pregnant and Teo had bailed on her. She’d had days she remembered more fondly. Yes, just a few.
Here came Vanessa, on a bicycle. She chained it to the rack in front of the restaurant. That hadn’t been there before the supervolcano went off. Weeds pushed through cracks in the asphalt of the parking lot now. From where Louise was sitting, she couldn’t see any cars parked on it.
She waved when her daughter came inside. Vanessa hurried to the table. Louise stood up. They briefly hugged, then drew apart again. “How you doing, Mom?” Vanessa asked as they sat down across from each other.
“I’m here,” Louise answered dryly. “You?”
“Here,” Vanessa agreed. “Still trying to climb out of the hole that miserable Balkan bastard left me in. The goddamn cops in Alabama just won’t go after him. He didn’t steal from anybody there, so for them it’s like it never happened. SoCal might as well be Mongolia as far as the rednecks are concerned.”
“Are you ready to order?” Carrows seemed to specialize in bright-eyed, smiling waitresses. This one must have heard the end of Vanessa’s snarl, but she didn’t let on.
“Let me have the bacon and eggs and hash browns,” Louise said. Vanessa chose the same thing, only with a slice of ham instead of the bacon. Eggs, pork, potatoes… You could still get those. The selection didn’t come with toast, the way it would have before the eruption.
When the waitress took the orders back to the kitchen, Vanessa asked, “What have you been up to? Are you getting any?”
Louise wouldn’t—couldn’t—have been so blunt if you’d put her on the rack. “You always were charming, dear,” she murmured, and sipped at her water. Water was still free. Los Angeles, these days, had more than it knew what to do with.
Vanessa just shrugged. “Hey, why waste time beating around the bush?”
“As a matter of fact, I am,” Louise answered, and had the satisfaction of startling her daughter. She didn’t say the man she was sleeping with was her boss. Vanessa would have had some remarks on that score, all of them no doubt pointed but none germane. She did add, “He’s very nice. It’s… comfortable.” She looked for the right word, and found it after a moment.
“Comfortable!” It wasn’t a word, or an idea, to suit Vanessa. “What good is that? I want a man who makes my heart pound, a man who’s exciting!”
“Wasn’t it exciting when Bronislav siphoned all the money out of your savings?” Louise couldn’t resist the jab. Truth to tell, she didn’t try very hard.
Vanessa glared at her. “That’s a low blow, Mom.”
“Well, if you can take shots at what I’m looking for, why shouldn’t I be able to do the same thing back?”
Vanessa didn’t answer. Louise didn’t need to do a mind-reading act to know what she was thinking, though. She was thinking she didn’t like to be on the receiving end. She never had. Unfortunately, life didn’t let you dish it out all the time. It would have been a lot more fun if it had.
Before they could start slanging each other for real, the waitress came back with their food. “That was fast,” Louise said—talking to someone besides her daughter might take the edge off things.
“We want to keep people happy,” the girl said. No doubt they also wanted to move as many customers as they could through the tables they had, but that didn’t sound so friendly. The waitress went on, “Remind me who had the ham and who had the bacon.”
After they sorted it out, Vanessa said, “She’s supposed to remember that, or else write it down.” But she didn’t grumble loud enough for the girl to overhear.
Nothing like bacon and eggs—except maybe ham and eggs—to improve your attitude. The silence in which mother and daughter ate was grim at first. It grew more companionable as their plates emptied. “That’s pretty good,” Louise said when she was almost finished.
“It is, isn’t it?” Vanessa sounded surprised the lunch was good, and even more surprised to be agreeing with her mother.
“I think the hash browns are from fresh potatoes. That’s what does it,” Louise said. “They’re more trouble than they’re worth to do at home. But the frozen hash browns you can get aren’t the same when you cook ’em.”
“They sure aren’t.” Vanessa agreed with her again. “Potato bricks. They’ve got about as much taste as cement, too.”
“They do.” Now Louise was doing the agreeing, and laughing while she did it.
“You know,” Vanessa said, “the way things are these days sucks. I mean, sucks bigtime.”
“Now that you mention it, yes.” Louise couldn’t very well quarrel with that. No one in her—or even his—right mind could. “And we’re lucky, as far as these things go. Power on and off, too much rain, a little snow in the wintertime… Your brother in Maine would trade in a minute, I bet.”
“If Rob doesn’t like it, why doesn’t he move back here?” Vanessa said.
“Well, I don’t exactly understand that, either,” Louise admitted. When Rob’s wife got pregnant, she’d thought that would make a perfect excuse for leaving the permafrost behind. But Rob and Lindsey and, by now, the baby were still there.
“Besides, I wasn’t just talking about the weather,” Vanessa said. “Prices are flying so high, you can’t even see them any more. Nobody can afford to drive a car except my boss, the asshole. And men are worse than ever, if you ask me. More depends on muscle now, so they think they’re hot shit in a crystal goblet. Makes me want to puke.”
Vanessa was touchy. She always had been. She got affronted even when she had no good reason to. When she did have a reason… Well, anything worth doing was worth overdoing, as far as Vanessa was concerned.
She had plenty of good reasons here. All the same, Louise asked, “What can you do about any of that?”
“I’d like to knock some of their stupid heads together, smack some sense into them.” Vanessa muttered darkly about cold diarrhea in a Dixie cup, which was the other half of what she’d said a minute before. Her mouth twisted. “Most of what I can really do is piss them off. Better than nothing, but not enough better.”