They have another beer and then she asks him to follow her back to her parents’ abandoned house, where she lights a few candles in the musty master bedroom and he undresses her on sheets that smell of mildew and potpourri. She’s more experienced than the last time they were together, when they were both nineteen and eager and clumsy. It’s evident in the way she moves, the sure paths of her hands. She knows what she wants and that excites him. They are both aware that this probably won’t happen again, so they take their time. They remember how it was and let how it is now unfold. He knows for certain that they no longer love each other. Maybe it was strange to think that after all this time they still would.
She braces her hands against the headboard while he presses himself into her from behind, his arms wrapped around her torso, his face buried in the sweat-slick swoop of her neck, and they are not at all concerned about how much noise they make. There is no one to hear them, not in this house and not in the house next door, or the next, or the next.
It’s two in the morning when he slips into the room he still shares with Wanda, but she’s awake. He should have known. She’s under a sheet, her flashlight glowing, flickering as she turns the page. She peeks out from the sheet when she hears him opening the dresser.
“Lucas,” she whispers, fastening her big, liquid gold eyes on him.
“Wanda.”
“What’s she like now?” She was fascinated by Gillian when they were together in high school, in awe of her silky black hair and her shimmery eye makeup and her expensive clothes. Wanda was always staring when Gillian came over. At the time it embarrassed him, but thinking back on it now he’s reminded of Flip and the way his little brother used to look at beautiful birds. They’re both students of beauty.
“She’s mostly the same.” He’s self-conscious about the smell of sex that surely must be all over him. He should’ve slept on the couch.
“Mmm.” Wanda stares at the ceiling, probably imagining the Gillian she used to know. The girl who sometimes brought her sweet treats, which she loved, and secondhand Barbie dolls, which she didn’t love. He braces himself for an interrogation. But then she’s flipping through her book again, seeing how many pages she has left. Lucas watches her count, marveling at how quickly she’s moved on. How easily she lets go. It’s a necessity of living in Rudder. But even so, it’s easier for some than for others. “Let me just finish this chapter, okay?” she asks.
“Okay,” he replies, and Wanda pulls the sheet back over her head. He suddenly remembers her disappearing act that afternoon. The state of her when she returned. “How…” He pauses, not sure what he’s asking. “How’d it go with Dad?”
“Fine,” she says from under the sheet. He hears a page turn.
“And you’re okay?”
“I’m reading.”
Sharing the room used to bother him in high school, but he doesn’t mind anymore. Finding an apartment nearby crosses Lucas’s mind every once in a while, but he never does anything about it. He feels needed here and he’s trying to save his paychecks, small as they are. Getting a place of his own at this point would mean he plans on staying. He leaves Wanda to her book and peels off his T-shirt in the diffused glow of her flashlight, then slips into bed wearing just a pair of shorts, already sweating.
He didn’t mention to Gillian the college applications he’s already printed out, tucked away in the bottom of his shirt drawer in a neat white stack, or the bank account he’s earmarked for tuition. He hasn’t mentioned them to anyone. Not yet. Not until he knows if they’ll even take him, because they probably won’t. He didn’t mention it because he knew she’d misunderstand. It isn’t that he wants to leave Rudder behind. It’s that he wants to learn how to save it.
Chapter 33
Kirby wakes Wanda at the crack of dawn the following morning to inform her that she’ll be expected at the blue house at 3:15 and not a minute later. It’s her first day back at school and also the first day of his hastily arranged agreement with Phyllis.
“Which house?” she asks, sleep crusted at the corners of her eyes.
“The blue one. Phyllis’s. Across the road.”
“Dad, no, I don’t want to. I don’t need a babysitter.”
“You do, Wanda. Obviously you do, if you think that riding your bike down to the Edge by yourself is okay.” She gets up and sulks around the kitchen while Kirby and Lucas empty the coffeepot into their thermoses. Lucas goes out to start the truck and Kirby turns to Wanda. “Straight to school, then straight to Phyllis’s after.” He leaves her sullen and silent at the kitchen table, not at all confident that she’ll do as she’s told. But what else can he say?
He goes out to the idling truck and Lucas slides over to the passenger seat. Kirby drives—Kirby always drives—and they discuss the job sites they have yet to service. There are so many. But it will get done. Somehow, it will. Kirby and his crew yank the town back from the brink of chaos, again and again and again. They clear the roads, they restring the wires, they turn the lights back on. The air conditioners, the refrigerators, the phone chargers, the televisions, the microwaves, the electric toothbrushes, the water pumps. But the thing is, even with every appliance running on high, power zipping along the local lines, into the transformers, the breakers, the wires, down into the sockets, into the homes, into the gadgets and gizmos, it can never go back to the way it was. Not all the way. They can’t fix everything. They get to what they can before the next storm arrives and usually it’s enough, but it’s never everything. Whatever they replace might be gone in a week. A month. At best, the lifetime of a wire here is down to two years. Rudder crumbles before his eyes: roads eaten away by floods, trees felled by the winds, houses knocked off their foundations. Each year, more people leave. Each year, the town’s budget for repairs and maintenance shrinks. What would it take to save it? The easy answer is money. The other answer is more complicated. Feats of engineering to protect them from the sea, higher roads, more durable utilities, global climate control, international policy decisions that should have been made decades ago. Time travel and politics. But in the end, it’s always been money.
Kirby and Lucas pull into the yard and Brenda is waiting. She leans against the bucket truck, smoking a Winston with one hand and shading her eyes with the other. This is what’s left of his crew. The others slipped away over the years: Emilio retired and Kirby took over, Wes accepted a job with a contractor based out of the Panhandle, and Jerome got his license back and then promptly drove his car into a utility pole. A pitch-black joke. The pole survived; Jerome didn’t. The municipality used to promise Kirby they’d give him salaries for more linemen, but they don’t even mention it anymore.
The three of them load a new pole onto the trailer and hitch it to the bucket truck, then they drive out, Kirby and Brenda in the bucket truck, Lucas in the pickup. At the site, they get to digging out the pole that broke off in the storm. It’s already hot; they’re drenched with sweat as soon as they start. By lunchtime, they’ve pulled out the old stump and they sit in their trucks, the air-conditioning blasting, eating their warmed-over cold cuts. Kirby calls the congressman for their district three times in a row, but there’s no answer and the voice mail is full. He tries the offices of both senators, two times apiece. Nothing goes through. He’s not a political man by nature; Lucas is the one who put this idea of petitioning the government for help in his head.