Everything Has Changed

by Darrell Maloney

  Going back to Arkansas went even faster. For the four weeks or so they spent at Rocki’s hospital gave road crews ample time to clear the ash from the interstate highways.

  Not all of it, mind you.

  Removing all of it would take years. For this wasn’t snow. It wouldn’t melt and dry up on its own.

  No, this ash had to be picked up and loaded onto trucks and driven away to… somewhere… where it could be safely disposed of. And every time the wind blew, every time it rained, more of the ash would be brought in from other areas to coat the roadways again.

  But for now, at least, the travel lanes were relatively free of the ash, allowing traffic to flow here and there rather smoothly.

  They’d been able to get from Hays, Kansas to Little Rock in half the time of the original trip.

  That was good, because they were a lot more crowded on the return trip.

  Rocki and Darrell were with them this time.

  But being packed in to the same vehicle gave the group plenty of time to talk about their future. Where they’d resettle. What kind of work they’d do. What the future held for them in general.

  The chitlins took the opportunity to gang up on their mom, since she was a captive prisoner.

  Jenn had long before perfected a sneaky way of avoiding conversations she didn’t want to have with her kids.

  “Hey Momma, I think I’m old enough to start getting an allowance.”

  “I’m sorry, honey. But I’m kinda busy. If you want to help me with the dishes we can talk then.”

  “Um… never mind. It’ll wait.”

  “Hey Momma, do you think I’m old enough to start dating boys?”

  “Well, let’s talk about it while we’re pulling weeds out of the garden, okay?”

  “That’s okay. Maybe I should wait for a couple more years.”

  “Hey Momma, where do babies come from?”

  “I’ll tell you after I finish cleaning, Sam. If you’ll vacuum while I dust I’ll get finished faster.”

  “That’s okay. I didn’t really want to know after all.”

  It had always worked well in the past.

  But here, in a crowded Humvee driving down Interstate 49 through southern Missouri, there were no dishes to do.

  No vacuuming or weeding either.

  Jenn had no way to deflect, no way to distract.

  No way to get out of the conversation at hand.

  “Momma?”

  “Yes, Meadow?”

  “Twerp-face and Doo Doo Head elected me as our official spokesperson.”

  “Spokesperson for what, honey?”

  “To ask you what your intentions are with Vince.”

  Darrell turned to Rocki and silently voiced the name again: “Vince?”

  Rocki leaned over to him and whispered, “Jenn met him just before they came to find us.”

  Jenn, who’d just relinquished the wheel to Darrell after having driven for two hours, sat in the back seat with the chitlins, where she couldn’t get away.

  “What do you mean, Meadow?”

  “Well, do you plan to marry him, or just play kissy-face with him for awhile?”

  “Excuse me, honey. I don’t think that’s an appropriate way for a daughter to talk to her mother.”

  “But we kinda need to know, Momma. Whatever you decide to do with Vince is gonna affect us too.”

  “How so?”

  “Well, if you get serious with Vince and want to marry him, and if he doesn’t want to leave Little Rock, then we’ll have to stay there.

  “And we’ve decided we don’t want to stay in Little Rock. There’s too much ash, and we don’t want to spend the rest of our lives having to wear those white paper masks every time we go outside. We decided that would suck.”

  Jenn saw an opportunity to hijack the topic at hand and divert it toward something else. It probably wouldn’t work as well as pulling weeds from the garden, but she’d give it a shot.

  “I wasn’t aware you guys decided you wanted to move. Last I heard you were still debating among yourselves.”

  “Oh, we decided. We definitely want to move. What we’re still debating is whether we want to move to southern California or to Alaska.”

  “But you definitely want to move? Meadow, it isn’t like you guys to actually agree on something. You never agree on anything.”

  “Well, we agree that we want to move. Twerp-face wants to move to Alaska, and Doo Doo Head wants to move to southern California. But we all want to move away from Little Rock.”

  “Remind me again which one is Doo Doo Head. I never can remember.”

  “Doo Doo Head is Samson.”

  From the third row of seats Samson smiled broadly, confirming his nickname.

  Young boys are proud of the strangest things.

  Chapter 10

  Meadow realized she was being had.

  “Wait a minute. I think you’re trying to deflect.”

  “Deflect? Honey, what are you talking about?”

  “Deflect, Mom. Deflect. Like what the politicians all do on TV. Like when a reporter asks a congressman what he’s doing to help create jobs. And the congressman ignores the question completely and starts talking about a new bill he wrote to bring down interest rates. It has nothing to do with the reporter’s question. But it distracts the reporter because the congressman didn’t want to answer it.

  “That’s what you’re doing, Momma. Did you think I was too blind to see?”

  “I’m glad you mentioned blind, honey. One of the nurses told me that we need to get some eye drops after we get back home and start putting a drop or two in each of your eyes every night at bedtime.”

  “Why?”

  “She said she heard that there were microscopic particles in the air now, all over the Unites States. Particles too small to see but which can cause blindness in the long term. And that the drops will help wash them out at the end of each day. So that they’re not sitting on your eyes doing damage as you sleep.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Yes. It’s a real thing.”

  “Pinky swear?”

  “Yes, pinky swear.”

  “Are you sure you’re not trying to deflect?”

  “Maybe a little. But the eye drops are a real thing.”

  Meadow rolled her eyes.

  “I’ll tell you what, Momma. I’ll remind you to stop at a CVS when we get back to Little Rock and stock up on eye drops. But you have to stop deflecting and talk to me about where you and Vince are going. Okay?”

  Jenn pretended to pout.

  She said, “Okaaayyy.”

  Truth was, she’d already planned to call a family meeting after they returned to Little Rock. She’d planned to invite Vince to the meeting and to tell him that they – she and the kids – were on their way to another place to start a new life.

  “I plan to tell him he’s welcome to come with us, if he really meant what he told me before we left for Kansas.”

  “What did he tell you, exactly?”

  “That he was developing feelings for me, and that he wanted to find out if a relationship would work out.”

  “So you’re going to invite him along?”

  “If he wants to come. And if he wants to come along, I plan to give him a vote. It’s only fair. But I plan to tell him we’re leaving, with or without him.”

  “So…” Autumn interrupted, “This means we won’t know where we’re gonna move until we get to Little Rock and have our meeting with Vince?”

  “That’s right, honey. If Vince is involved, he needs to have a vote too.”

  Rocki cleared her throat.

  She was ignored.

  Meadow said, “What if we vote now? And if Alaska wins by more than one vote we won’t have to even ask Vince. Because his vote wouldn’t matter anyway.”

  Sam had an objection to that.

  “Alaska isn’t going to win by more than one vote. Southern California will win by at least six votes.”

  “There�
��s not even six of us,” Meadow responded. “Go back to your video games and let the adults talk, Doo Doo Head.”

  Rocki cleared her throat again.

  She was ignored again.

  “Well, Mom?” Meadow demanded. “Why don’t we vote now? Vince’s vote might not even be needed.”

  “It wouldn’t be fair, Meadow, to tell him we’re taking him to a place he may not want to go.”

  “But that’s just it, Mom. Nobody’s forcing him to go. If we tell him where we’re going and he doesn’t want to go there, he can simply stay behind.”

  “No, honey. That’s not fair. If we invite him to come along it’ll be because we… I… want him to be included in our family. And if he’s going to be part of our family, he has just as much right as anybody else to have an input.”

  Rocki got tired of clearing her throat, deciding no one was going to invite her into the conversation. She just jumped in with both feet.

  “Meadow, honey… you don’t like Vince very much, do you?”

  Jenn looked surprised. Meadow looked down at her hands.

  Autumn hadn’t spoken for awhile. And if there was one thing Autumn genuinely hated, it was going more than five seconds without talking.

  “No, she doesn’t. She told me so.”

  “Shut up, Twerp-face.”

  “No, you shut up.”

  “Go ahead, Meadow. Tell Nana what you told me.”

  Rocki said, “Yes, Meadow. Please tell me what you told Twerp-face.”

  Autumn said, “Hey!!!!”

  Samson cracked up laughing.

  Even Meadow cracked a smile. And she gave in.

  She turned to her Nana and said, “I never said I didn’t like Vince. In fact, I think he’s a nice guy.

  “All I said was that Momma’s been single for awhile now. And that it was nice not having to share her with a dumb old man for a change.”

  Jenn reached over and hugged her oldest daughter and said, “Oh, honey. I didn’t know you felt that way.”

  From the driver’s seat came a voice everyone else had forgotten about.

  Darrell said, “Can I say something on behalf of all dumb old men everywhere?”

  Meadow sheepishly replied, “Oh, for goodness sake, Grandpa. If you must…”

  “Us dumb old men might get in the way of important decisions and stuff, but we come in handy for some things.”

  Rocki said, “Name two.”

  “Okay… how about changing light bulbs and catching mice?”

  Meadow was unimpressed.

  “Shoot. That’s why we have chairs and mousetraps, Grandpa.”

  Chapter 11

  John and Hillary Marshal were chomping at the bits to inventory their building materials, for that was the only thing holding up their log cabin.

  And Sid certainly wasn’t going to hold them back.

  “Okay, up there where those four stakes are mark the four corners of your cabin, correct?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You don’t have to call me sir, John. I work for a living, just like you.”

  “Okay. Then yes, Sid. That’s where the cabin will eventually be.”

  “Okay,” Sid said. “Let’s spread out the tarp and get started.

  “Now, there are seventy four different line items on the inventory list, and each item has a quantity from one to sixty five.

  “They’re arranged in a particular order, in order of need. For example, the first thing on the list is a shovel, so that you can dig a trench from your kitchen to your well, which will be on your west property line and which you’ll share with your next door neighbor. The trench will be exactly two hundred feet long.

  “It’ll be the first thing you do because it’s easier to dig the trench before you start building the log walls. Otherwise you’d have to dig the same trench underneath the walls.”

  “Makes sense,” Hillary said.

  “So the first thing we’ll find is the shovel. There’s only one. Once you find it, put it right over there, close to the cabin. Since it’ll be the first thing you’ll use, it’ll be the closest thing to the cabin.”

  John found the shovel in the big pile of odds and ends, picked it up, and quickly ferried it over to the cabin site.

  He put it down right next to one of the orange-flagged stakes.

  Then he came back and said, “Done.”

  Sid placed his initials on the inventory sheet, next to line item number 1.

  He had John place his initials right next to his own.

  “Okay, item two. Two hundred feet of plastic PVC pipe, white, one and a quarter inches in diameter. These come in twenty foot sections, so there should be ten of them.”

  These were a little easier to find than the shovel, for they were the longest of the building supplies.

  Hillary reached down to grab one, but had trouble lifting it up because it was mostly buried under other materials.

  Dragging it out was much easier.

  John grabbed another and did the same thing.

  Now, Sid wasn’t like a lot of FEMA employees.

  Although he was an administrator, and his primary purpose in life was accounting and procuring, he wasn’t the type of man who never lifted anything heavier than a pen.

  He put his clipboard on the ground and his pen back in his pocket and joined in the fun.

  Working together, the three of them found all ten pieces of pipe and dragged them over toward the cabin site. There they placed them next to the shovel, and just a little bit farther from where the cabin would be.

  One line item at a time, they eventually got everything counted and placed.

  It was the little things that took the most time: the hinges and door knobs and drawer pulls. They were all co-mingled in three boxes and had to be sorted out.

  By the time they placed their initials on the last item almost an hour had elapsed.

  “Now what?” John asked.

  “Now we talk about the stuff you didn’t get. Several line items are coming by truck, due to weight or class restrictions.”

  “Huh?”

  “Exactly. I get the ‘huh’ response every single time. You’re going to get forty sacks of mortar, forty sacks of Sacrete, sixty pieces of pavestone. They’ll be delivered by truck within five days. If they’re not here within five days come see me and let me know. I’ll light a fire up under them.

  A separate truck will bring your pipe cement. It’s a restricted item, so be prepared to show them ID to prove you’re at least eighteen years of age.

  They both laughed. They were well into their thirties and looked even older due to the stress Yellowstone had heaped upon them.

  Sid checked his watch.

  “Now, I’ve got just half an hour to get to my truck and go over to site 7403 before the chopper returns to drop their next load.”

  “So you don’t have time to sit down and enjoy a beer with us? It’s the least we can do, for all the help you’ve given. You’ve really gone the extra mile. And we really appreciate it.”

  Sid smiled.

  “Maybe I’ll drop by tonight, if I can get a rain check.”

  “No problem. Any time, any day.”

  He smiled.

  Sid seemed to have a much easier time making friends here than at any other time in his life.

  The people living in RVs at the lake site viewed him as half saint and half Santa Claus.

  He didn’t know it, but many of the kids had even taken to calling him “The Candy Man” after the old Sammy Davis Jr. song.

  After all, he certainly fit the bill, for he brought joy and happiness every time he showed his face.

  The Marshals taken care of, Sid trudged to his RV and unlocked its door.

  It had been shut up since Friday afternoon, the air conditioning turned off, and he immediately realized what he’d forgotten to do the previous week.

  It hit him like a ton of bricks, greatly offending his sense of smell.

  The milk.

  He’d pul
led it out of the refrigerator on Friday, knowing it would go sour over the weekend.

  There was half a carton left, and his intent was to drink it all. Then to throw the empty carton in the dumpster on the roadway a hundred feet from his door.

  He’d forgotten to drink it.

  He’d left it on the counter.

  The entire RV smelled of extremely sour milk, made worse by the fact it was shut up for two full days.

  No problem, though.

  A full can of air freshener made the place tolerable again.

  He opened all his windows so the breeze would pass through, taking most of the rest of the stench with it.

  By the time night came and he lay his head down to sleep the smell would be gone.

  At least he hoped.

  He sighed, grabbed his pickup keys, then went out and climbed in the vehicle.

  It smelled so much better than his RV.

  He took a deep breath and started the engine.

  Chapter 12

  A few minutes later he pulled up alongside John and Hillary Marshal. John was digging the first few shovels of dirt on his trench and Hillary was watching him and awaiting her turn to help.

  Sid said, “I forgot to give you guys something important.”

  He took some more papers from his attaché and passed them to Hillary.

  “This first one just details what you’ll need to do for the next few days. It’s pretty self-explanatory, but if you have any questions find a radio and leave a message at the FEMA station for me, and I’ll drop by first chance I get.

  “The lumberjack team assigned to your site will be by today or tomorrow. They’ll start cutting down trees on the back of your property while you’re digging the trench for your water pipe. Be sure to dig it at least fifteen inches deep to prevent it from freezing. Twenty would be better.

  “They’ll cut twelve trees and strip the branches off. Then they’ll drag them over to your cabin site and they’ll show you how to notch them.

  “They’ll come by every three days until you have them all notched. They have to inspect them to make sure they’re notched properly, or your cabin won’t fit together correctly.

  “Once they inspect them they’ll give you the go-ahead to place them. They’ll come back three days later and if they’re placed they’ll cut down another batch for you.