by Lou Cadle
It took another ninety minutes to get the tree branches arranged to the satisfaction of the adults. They split up, Kelly and Sierra walking up the hill on the shoulder of the highway, and all the males going down the hill to take a look at their work from a distance. From uphill, it didn’t look natural to her, but then if a tree had fallen and road workers had come along to take branches off, they might have pulled them off the road just like that.
“I don’t know,” she said to Kelly. “I know the road is there, so I can’t see it with a stranger’s eyes.”
“It’s okay. The danger will likely be from people coming up the road, not down it.”
“Do you really think people will be coming up from Phoenix?”
“Cottonwood too, maybe. Though they might go west from there instead to get out of the heat, to Prescott. I would.”
“There are more stores and stuff in Prescott than in Payson, aren’t there?”
“Yes. It’s nearly three times as big.”
“Higher, or lower?”
“A bit higher than Payson. About where we are in elevation.”
They walked back to their road. “Have you been there?”
“Sure. You haven’t?”
“No. Phoenix and Flag, and that’s about it.”
“I forget sometimes how much less you kids have traveled than we did. Our grandparents went a lot of places.”
“Have you been on an airplane?”
“More than once. Last time was when Dev was a baby. I took him to meet my parents.”
Sierra wished she could have flown, but by the time she was born it was really expensive to fly. It was part of why her mother had never come back to the U.S. again. “What was it like?”
“Crowded.”
“But looking out and seeing the clouds and stuff.”
“I only had a window seat once. It made me nervous, to tell you the truth.”
Sierra snorted. “I can’t imagine you being nervous.”
“Really? I’m a little nervous right now.”
“What about?”
“About what’s going to happen in a week or two. About if we’ll be ready for it.”
The men came back, leaving Dev standing alone down the hill, and they did a bit of work shifting the branches around until Dev shouted that it looked good. Mr. Henry took a small green branch and used it like a broom, smoothing out the rocks next to the road as Dev walked back.
“What’s he doing?” Sierra asked Pilar.
Dev answered, “Getting rid of footprints. If people drive past, they’d never see them. But if they’re walking up, it might clue them in to someone being back here.”
Sierra turned around and looked up their road. “What about the turbines? Won’t they be able to see them?”
Pilar said, “From the right angle, yes, the one in the middle.”
Kelly said, “Maybe it’s time to think about painting them.”
Sierra looked up at the spinning blades and thought it would be impossible to paint them just right. From this angle, the tips hit the sky, which could be blue or gray or white or black, depending on time of day and if there were clouds. From a different angle, the side two towers would be backed by the pine forest, so you’d need green and brown.
Dev might have been thinking the same thing because he said, “I know it’d cost you power, but if we think there’s more trouble coming, you might want to turn that middle one off in the daytime. If it isn’t moving, they’re less likely to catch the eye.”
“There’s more trouble coming,” his mother said. “I can feel it.”
The group broke up without deciding anything more. Everyone had other work to do.
Sierra and her father went back to their place and caught up on chores. This was the time of year there was most to do. Eggs, garden, watering the compost pile until the monsoon came, dehydrating or freezing, and keeping an eye on the baby chicks that were hatching.
Bodhi ran up to her and she leaned down and hugged him, wanting the comfort of his uncomplicated love. Yesterday had been scary, and the Quinns’ certainty that more trouble was coming was scary. She hoped they were just being their usual selves, paranoid and doomcasting. But her father had the idea to take the tree down. She wanted to ask him to tell her nothing else would go wrong, but she was afraid to ask him, for what he might say could be worse.
Before she could formulate a question she might want to hear the answer to, he said, “Help me with the garden for an hour.”
They weeded and tied up some vines, though the weeding didn’t take long. The plants were getting big enough they’d crowded out the weeds. They harvested a variety of ripe vegetables and put them into a bushel basket.
When they were done he said, “Please check for new eggs. And then can you cook?”
“I’m willing, but I’m so bad at it.”
“Doesn’t need to be fancy. Boil up some spaghetti, and halfway through toss in some of those peas we just picked, pods and all, and open a jar of sauce from last year. Boil up a dozen eggs for protein. The oldest ones in the fridge, not the ones you get right now. Can you handle it?”
“I guess.”
“Why not call one of your friends while you’re working in the kitchen? Entertain yourself.”
That made cooking sound more appealing. “Okay,” she said, and she went off to gather eggs. The hens were laying a lot right now. It was almost the longest day of the year.
She called Mia, but Mia said she was with Rudy and hung up after about two minutes. Mia used to be her best friend, but she didn’t even come up for her graduation party. Not that it had been such a big thing, just Dev and the families and the Morrows. Honey Jarrett had come instead, and that had been more fun than she had anticipated. Like Sierra, Honey didn’t have a boyfriend right now. She’d been one of the ones to answer the text this morning. She phoned her next.
Honey said, “Ten minutes, and I’ll call you back, okay?”
Sierra the vegetables. Most of the vegetables and fruits she lined up on the counter. They didn’t refrigerate much from their garden, just delicate stuff like strawberries if they didn’t eat them all the first day.
There was enough coming in that Pilar was going to start talking about canning soon. Pickled eggs. Gah. She didn’t like them by themselves, but if you mixed them with plenty of mayo and put them on Pilar’s homemade bread, they were edible. She wondered again about the man and the little girl. Maybe if you got that hungry, you’d start to like pickled eggs.
She checked the breadbox. Regular loaf only. A baguette would be better for spaghetti, but it didn’t really matter, did it?
Honey phoned back as she was splitting the peas in half. A few were big, old, and not tender, so she pulled the peas out of those and put the pods in the compost trash. Sometimes at the end of the season, when there was more time, Pilar made vegetable stock with stuff like that before putting the cooked up ends into the compost. Another kitchen task she didn’t know how to do.
“What are you doing?” Honey said.
“Cooking, which I suck at.”
“I’d rather cook than clean, but I have to do both.”
“Pilar usually cooks.”
“My dad would blow a gasket if I tried calling him by his first name.”
Sierra checked the water. Bubbling at the bottom of both pans but not boiling yet. “I always called them Theda and Pilar. It’d seem odd to call them anything else.”
“Have you heard from your mom lately?”
“I get an email once a week. Or a text. We haven’t Skyped in a month. The place she’s at doesn’t have good internet.”
“Don’t you miss her?”
“I’m used to her not being here.” Sierra had missed her a lot when she was a kid. And at other times. When she’d been bullied briefly back in junior high, and when she’d started her period. But she’d survived both with only a father.
“What about your dad’s girlfriend, is she back yet?”
“No. Tha
nks for reminding me. I should ask him at dinner what she’s said. She’s like a couple weeks overdue.”
“Probably no gas to get back. We have to walk everywhere.”
“Do you have a bike?”
“I did, but it got stolen. And now, people who have bikes to sell are charging like five or six hundred dollars for one that’s old and rusty with flat tires.”
“Wow. I wonder if we still have a bike. I’ll have to look.”
“Chain it up if you do. They’re getting stolen all the time. My dad says people are buying back their own bikes from thieves, two or three times over.”
She finished checking the fresh eggs and stored them, pulling out six old ones from the back of the fridge to boil. “I think I’d try stealing it back.”
“Really. Me too. I mean, I would if I knew where mine was.” Honey went on and talked about kids from school. Some who had been headed to college were nervous that they wouldn’t be able to get there. One really smart kid, Ryan, had changed from his first choice college, UCLA, and switched to Flag, which had been his fallback choice.
“Must be nice to have two choices,” Honey said. “I can’t go to college and I can’t find a job. I don’t know what I’m going to do. Babysit, maybe. Maybe people will hire me to weed their gardens. Or guard them. Like a living scarecrow.”
The water in the big pot was starting to boil. Sierra broke the spaghetti in half and dumped it in. “Do you know how to cook spaghetti?”
“It’s pretty simple. Boil water, and put it in.”
“That’s it?”
“Stir it twice so it doesn’t stick to itself.”
“See, I didn’t know that.” Or maybe, come to think of it, she had noticed Pilar doing that. Often when he cooked, she was at the kitchen table doing homework. But her years of homework were behind her. She’d have to pay better attention to Pilar’s cooking in the future.
She and Honey talked until the food was all ready, and then Sierra begged off. “Sorry, but we’re about to eat.”
“Thanks for calling. Maybe I can come up there again sometime when there’s more gas. Too long to ride a bike, even if I had one.”
“Maybe you can steal bikes for a living, sell them back to their original owners.”
“Ha. My dad would kill me for sure.”
Sierra peeled the eggs, burning her fingertips at first until she remembered to do it under cold water. She kept a lid on the spaghetti, and put the steaming eggs into a blue flowered bowl that didn’t match anything else. She put out two big white plates and went out to call Pilar, saying what he always did at mealtimes, “Come and get it!”
The spaghetti was mooshier than when Pilar made it, but she liked it this way just fine. They ate in silence for ten minutes, both of them hungry from the hard work of hauling tree branches around half the day.
When she had taken the edge off her hunger, Sierra said, “Have you heard from Lisette? Is there a gas problem there too?”
“There’s gas problems everywhere, as far as I can tell.”
“Where’s she staying?”
“With a friend who has a casita, a guest house.”
“Do you miss her?”
He put down his fork and rubbed his face. “I think it’s possible she won’t be coming back.”
“She still has stuff here. Clothes and shoes.”
“For that, maybe. When there’s gas again.”
“You mean you’re breaking up?”
“Yeah. I guess I mean we’re breaking up.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Thanks.”
“You must be sad.”
“I’m over sad. Resigned, I think.”
“You sound sad.”
“That’s just tired you’re hearing.” He obviously didn’t want to talk about it.
“I’m tired too. I’ve decided not to be a lumberjack for a living.”
He smiled at her. “What do you think you want to be?”
“Not a cook, obviously.”
“You know, maybe you can take a few cooking lessons from Kelly, if she’s willing. I can barter something with her for her time.”
“I’m not that interested.”
“I was thinking.” He mushed up some strawberries with his fork and transferred them onto a slice of bread, then took a bite. When he’d swallowed, he said, “I might not be able to send you to university. And you might not be able to find a job anywhere right now, not with the gas situation as it is. But at the least, I can teach you more about running this place. What if I break my leg or something, and you need to do everything? We’ll start with cooking.”
“I’d just as soon you started with letting me climb the turbines.”
“I’ll do that too.”
Her mouth dropped open. “Really?” He’d never let her up one before. Too dangerous, he’d always said.
“Really. You’re an adult now. I can trust you to be careful when I say to be careful, can’t I?”
“Sure.”
“Quinn has Dev able to do pretty much everything he can do. Maybe I’ve been remiss in not pushing you to learn more.”
“Dev didn’t go to school.”
“That’s so. I know you were busy.” He pushed back. “Good job with the meal.”
“It wasn’t great, was it?” She felt guilty about not feeding him as well as he fed her, something she’d never felt before. She had been busy, with school, and friends, intramural basketball for a time and later the school radio station, where she’d worked not on-air, but as an engineer and producer.
“The spaghetti was fine, and it fueled us until the next meal. With practice, you’ll get better.”
Sierra flashed back to Dev, talking to Mr. Henry like he was an equal, and for the first time thought about the possibility that she wasn’t advanced of Dev—something she’d always taken for granted—but was behind him now. She was out of school, and she’d be eighteen in a few months and officially an adult. It was time to learn to do adult things.
Cooking—blah. And talking to Mr. Henry by choice? Not if she could possibly avoid it. But climbing the towers? That would be great. She wasn’t bad at mechanical stuff. Maybe she could become an apprentice in fixing turbines.
Chapter 14
“Do we have bikes?” his daughter asked him the next morning at breakfast.
Pilar was surprised at the question but happy to be distracted from what he’d read on the news feed this morning. Riots in Phoenix over food in a poor section of town. He hoped it was only a hiccup, that Quinn wasn’t right about this being the end of civilization. There’d been riots there before, several over his lifetime. Elections caused them. Law changes. Cops shooting poor people. But food shortages? That was different. It wasn’t an event that would come and go. If the gas shortage meant food wasn’t delivered—or harvested in the first place—then the food deliveries to cities might not keep up with the need.
And then what would happen?
He pushed the thought out of his mind and focused on his daughter. “Why a bike? Do you want to go into town? Missing your friends?”
“Not an awful lot. But one day, maybe we’ll need to ride down there. To buy parts or something. There hasn’t been gas in a couple weeks now.”
“We do have a bike. What we’re missing is a trailer for it. To shop, you’d need a trailer. And it’d be a hell of a pull up that hill, even without a trailer.”
“Do you think I could do it?”
“I think you’d have to get off and walk about halfway.” They were eating oatmeal with fresh strawberries and toast, taking a break from eggs. He’d have to make more bread today, but there was so much else to do. He was feeling pressure—not the normal pressure of peak garden season and regular maintenance chores, but the pressure of his sense of the world out there falling apart, the trouble in Phoenix not nearly far enough away for his comfort.
“Dad!”
It shocked him out of his rumination. “You never call me that.”
“I
wasn’t having any luck with your name.”
“Sorry. I got to thinking.”
“About what? The bike?”
“No.” He didn’t want to answer. Part of him wanted to keep his little girl a little girl forever. He wanted her to be protected, to have a nice life. He’d give anything—ten years off his own life, if there were a force out there in the universe who could make such a trade—to give her the start to life he’d had, with attending university and gas still affordable, movie dates and coffee house discussions about philosophy. He didn’t want her to think about people breaking in for their food, or worse.
But if she was to be protected, she had to know. She had to be able to protect herself.
“Why are you looking at me like that?”
“I just....” He swallowed past a lump in his throat. Then, before he could stop himself, he felt a tear run down his cheek. “Damn. Sorry.”
“What’s wrong? Is it Lisette? Did you hear from her again?”
He shook his head and swiped away the tear. “No. Just having one of those misty parent moments.”
She looked confused.
“You’re all grown up.”
“Yeah. But why would that make you cry?”
He had to laugh at her perplexed expression, and the tearful urge was gone. “You have to be a parent to understand, I guess. Anyway. There are some important things to do.”
She groaned, a teenager’s groan, not an adult’s. “You’re going to want to can strawberries and pickle eggs, aren’t you? I knew it.”
“Soon, but not today. I want to start you on some defense training.” He hoped he hadn’t waited too late.
“What, like with the shotgun? I know how to use it.”
“The rifle. Target practice. Some dirty fighting tactics in hand-to-hand combat.” Not at all what he’d hoped his daughter would need to know.
“You sound like Dev.” Then she looked away, embarrassed.
“What’s wrong?” he said.
“Well,” she said. “I’ve been keeping something from you.”
Pilar couldn’t imagine what, but he braced himself. “What?”
