“Amen,” Dick Barber said quietly: pious agreement to a secular thought.
“Oh!” Farrell raised a gloved forefinger, as if at an afterthought he liked. “People have been screwing each other for as long as there’ve been people. You should probably do some of that, too.”
More laughter came from the audience. Rob had all he could do not to snicker out loud. Lindsey did squeak.
“You can laugh, but you can’t hide,” Farrell said with mock severity. “Since you aren’t even trying, you must want to go through with this. Rob, do you take Lindsey as your wife for richer and poorer, in sickness and in health, and for as long as you both shall live?” He might have been thinking or until one of you reaches for a lawyer, but he didn’t say it.
“I do,” Rob answered. Official it was, yes.
“Lindsey, do you likewise and likewise, respectively, and for just as long?”
“I do,” she said. Yes, it was very official.
“Then I do, too—pronounce you man and wife, that is,” Farrell said. “Mr. Ferguson, you may kiss Mrs. Ferguson.”
Rob did. Lindsey still hadn’t decided whether she’d take his last name or keep Kincaid. Rob wasn’t about to commit litcrit, though. He’d got a ring on a trip of his own to Dover-Foxcroft. He slipped it onto Lindsey’s finger. That was another way to make things official. And there was one more, but that would have to wait till after the reception.
Moose meat. Roast goose. Stewed squirrel. A home-smoked ham. Potatoes. Parsnips. Pickled mushrooms. Sauerkraut. Moonshine vodka and applejack. Store-bought whiskey somebody’d been saving for a snowy day.
Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles provided the dance music, with a local kid filling in for Rob. The kid wasn’t terrible, but Rob didn’t think he needed to worry about getting booted out of the band. On the dance floor, he was no threat to the ghosts of Michael Jackson and Fred Astaire. He didn’t worry about that, either.
The reception was a success. Everyone had plenty to eat. Nobody punched anybody else. No one groped Lindsey’s dad’s hot girlfriend (or if anyone did, she didn’t squawk about it). What more could you want?
Jim Farrell laid on his sleigh to take the newlyweds back to Lindsey’s apartment. “How about that?” Rob said as she unlocked the door. “We’re really married.” He picked her up and carried her over the threshold.
“Darn right we are,” she agreed. “And what do you propose to do about it, Mister?”
“I already proposed,” he pointed out. “Why don’t we go back to the bedroom, huh? I expect I’ll think of something.” They did, and he did.
XXI
Louise Ferguson hadn’t heard from her eldest son more than a handful of times since the supervolcano erupted. He seemed content to stay up there in Maine. That struck her as somewhere along the range between masochism and madness, but it was his life.
The postcard she found in her mailbox today bore a picture of the business end of a mosquito silhouetted against the sun. Beneath it was the legend THE STATE BIRD OF MAINE. She grunted laughter. That was the kind of thing he’d send, all right. She would have recognized the style even if she hadn’t recognized the spiky script on the back.
By the time you read this, I’ll be a married man, he wrote. Her name is Lindsey Kincaid. She teaches at the high school in town. So maybe one of these days you’ll have grandkids running around under the snow here. Say hello to anyone you happen to run into.—Rob.
From the postmark, the card had taken almost three weeks to cross the country. The USPS was one more outfit that had been in big trouble even before the supervolcano erupted. Trying to cope with all the insanity since the eruption hadn’t made it run better, or more efficiently. What could you do? The postcard had eventually got here.
She wished some of her bills would come so slowly, and that the bastards who sent them out would take the Post Office sucks as an excuse when her own payments ran late. The longer she stayed out of work, the later some of them got, too.
She would have been out in the street with her worldly goods piled on the curb if so many other people didn’t have the same problems for the same reasons. They weren’t too big to fail—the classic phrase from the recession before the eruption (a recession that now looked like pretty goddamn good times). But they were too numerous to evict, even if they had failed. Pay what you can when you can was rapidly ousting e pluribus unum as the national motto. Louise expected she’d start seeing it on coins and bills any day now.
If she wanted to keep collecting her divorced single mom’s mite from the California EDD, she had to keep looking for work. When she could, she did it on the Net and with her phone. When she couldn’t, she gritted her teeth, forked over some of her unemployment check to Marshall, and climbed aboard the bus for new adventures in Jobseekersland.