“No. It’s gonna be worse. A lot worse.”
“We don’t know that.”
“I’m fifteen fucking years old. I lived in lockdown for two of those years. I’m gonna be stuck in the Little House on the Fucking Prairie for the next two.”
“Wait. You actually read it?”
He shook his head. “Just the first few pages. It was awful. What made you think I would like that?”
“I loved it when I was a kid.”
“I sell weed.” She looked at him, trying to place the non sequitur. “It’s where I got the money.”
She nodded. That made sense. “OK.”
He frowned. “That’s it?”
She looked up at the still-growing line outside the Piggly Wiggly. “Doesn’t seem like we have time to get into it any more than that, does it?”
“I have twenty-two hundred dollars in cash from selling weed, and you don’t have the time to get into it?”
“OK. Sure. I’ll get into it. Don’t sell weed anymore, Scott.”
“Nice parenting.”
“Will you stop that? I’m sorry I said the shit I said. About your mom and dad.”
He shrugged. “It’s true.”
“Doesn’t mean anybody has a right to hit you in the face with it. I know they love you. They’re just deeply fucked-up human beings.”
He tried to laugh, but it came out ugly. He wiped snot from his nose.
Aubrey looked up at the line outside the store again. It was no shorter. It would never be shorter, and she thought about the empty rack in the basement. She thought about the darkness that would descend on them in less than three hours’ time, or five hours or one hour or never, depending on which news channel you favored, and she dug around inside herself, searching for the strength and patience to finish this conversation with not-her-kid with anything other than “Dry your fucking nose and get out of the car, you little shit.”
She tried something else. “There was this cartoon I saw once. There was a five-year-old boy in it. And somebody tells him to go to school, and he says, ‘But I’m only five years old.’ And then somebody tells him he’s got to go fight in a war, and they shove a helmet on his head, and they push him toward a battlefield, and he says, ‘But I’m only five years old.’ And then he goes home from the war, and they tell him he has to get married, and he’s standing at an altar with some woman twice as tall as he is and he says, ‘But I’m only five years old.’ And then they show him in a hospital bed, and there’s a big chart over him that has the word CANCER written on it in big letters and he says, ‘But I’m only five years old.’ You get where this is going?”
Scott looked at Aubrey, this flinty woman he’d never asked to have in his life, this thirty-eight-year-old who was just twenty-two when he was born, who wasn’t even thirty when she married his father. He regarded this innocent victim of circumstance whom God, in his infinite cruelty, had thrown into his path, and he wished she was anyone else.
He had no fucking clue what the point of her story was.
“I’m making it all up as I go, Scott. I’m only five years old.”
Aubrey’s phone buzzed and they both looked down at it. The screen lit up with a picture of Scott’s father. It was an old picture, Rusty was smiling in bright sunlight in the backyard of the house she and Scott still lived in, shirtless. Aubrey wished to Christ she’d changed it, but Rusty called so infrequently and upset her so thoroughly that she’d usually forgotten about it by the time they hung up. The result was his picture bugged the shit out of her every single time he called but remained unchanged.
She was about to answer, but Scott beat her to it. He pressed the button on the side of the phone, declining the call. He looked at Aubrey.
“I don’t want to go through this with you.”
“I don’t want to go through it with you either.”
Their feelings clear, Scott took the empty shopping bags and got out of the car. Aubrey followed.
5.
Stolp Island, Aurora
Rusty seriously doubted the world was coming to an end. But there was chaos in the making, no question about it, and if things were going to shut down he knew he needed to be ready. His first and most immediate problem was, as ever, money. He’d called Aubrey to try to get a sense of her general cash-on-hand situation, but of course the bitch didn’t pick up.
So now he’d had to move to plan B. He had exactly five hundred dollars to his name, money he’d just earned for fixing storm damage to Mrs. Krauthafer’s garage roof. He knew five hundred wouldn’t last him long. It was almost like having nothing at all, so there was really very little risk involved in treating it as seed money and trying to turn it into a larger, more comfortable amount. If that plan collapsed, he could always move back to option A, badgering his ex-wife for cash. She usually came through in the end.