Supervolcano All Fall Down(142)

Vanessa knew what she wanted to do. But punting an infant got you talked about in this effete age. Moving out seemed the better choice.

Or it would have, if she hadn’t been all but run out by Kelly. She was Colin Ferguson’s daughter, goddammit. Just because this chunky stranger was hauling her old man’s ashes, did that give the bitch the right to put on airs and boss her around?

Kelly sure seemed to think so. So did Vanessa’s dad. Marshall . . . Marshall shut himself in the room with the stupid police tape on the door and clattered away on that horrible antique of a typewriter. It was almost as annoying as Deborah. And he turned out silly, saccharine stories, full of erratic grammar and punctuation. She’d told him so when he asked her to read one. She hadn’t seen any more after that.

Of course, his prose looked like Edward Gibbon’s when you compared it to the subliterate garbage Nick Gorczany cranked out. Vanessa had forgotten how very delightful life at the widget works was before she headed for Colorado.

Maybe Gorczany had forgotten, too. When she set a memo on his desk heavily edited in red, he’d looked from it to her and back. “So good to have you on the job again, Vanessa,” he’d murmured.

“So good to be back,” she’d answered, and walked out of his office with her head held high. If he was going to get snide, she’d get snide right back. Yes, she needed work. But she needed her self-respect even more.

The one thing wrong with self-respect was, it wouldn’t buy groceries or pay the rent. The job would . . . more or less. Nick Gorczany hadn’t got himself that big old house in Palos Verdes Estates by overpaying his employees. If you didn’t like what he gave you, you could always go out and find yourself better-paying work.

“Ha,” Vanessa said, chopping cabbage in the crowded kitchen of the small one-bedroom in San Atanasio: about as far from the boss’ Palos Verdes Estates estate as you could get and still stay in the South Bay. “Ha, ha. Ha, ha, ha.”

It didn’t get any funnier, even if she made more laughy noises. Laughy? She nodded to herself. It bore the same relation to laugh as truthy did to truth. It wouldn’t go into the OED any time soon, but it filled a need. It did for her, anyhow.

She counted herself lucky Nick Gorczany had remembered she knew what she was doing when it came to translating bureaucratic horseshit into English. Her father and Kelly might have given her the bum’s rush even if she hadn’t snagged a job.

“They have expelled you from what is yours by right,” Bronislav said the first time he saw her apartment. His big hands folded into fists. “If it were not your father, I would make him pay for dispossessing you. We Serbs, we know too much about being wrongly dispossessed.”

“Don’t do anything like that! Don’t, you hear me?” Vanessa exclaimed. Bronislav was ready to turn a family squabble into an international incident. Vanessa had started learning what she could about ex-Yugoslavia. She didn’t want him to call her American any more, not the way he had in front of the Croat eatery in San Pedro. From everything she could see, Serbs did that kind of thing a lot. She was sure Gavrilo Princip would have agreed. So would Archduke Franz Ferdinand, these days the namesake of a band almost as quirky as the one her brother played in.

And Rob was married, up there in the glacial wilderness of Maine. He hadn’t bothered to let Vanessa know, not firsthand, but he’d sent cards to Dad and Mom, who’d both told her. Vanessa had trouble imagining a woman rash enough to want to tie the knot with her big brother, but there you were.

Here she was, all right. “Don’t!” she said one more time. She didn’t want Bronislav turning Dad’s car into an IED or anything like that. She wasn’t sure he knew how to do such things, but he was liable to. He was liable to want to show off for her, too. That was how he would think of it, anyhow.

“All right,” he said now. Did he sound sulky, like a kid deprived of his favorite toy? Damn straight he did.

So she found something else for him to do. And he did, with the same kind of enthusiasm he’d probably shown for guerrilla warfare while Yugoslavia was falling apart. But bedroom explosions had aftermaths much more enjoyable than those involving plastique.

Some of the things he did . . . “Where did you learn that?” she asked, her heart still thumping.

“I am a Serb. It is in my blood,” Bronislav replied with dignity. And maybe that was true, and maybe he’d picked it up from a jowly hooker in Barstow or Phoenix or Las Cruces or one of the other towns on the route that fed Los Angeles. How could you know for sure?

Simple. You couldn’t. But Vanessa chose to believe him. Choosing to believe was part of what love was all about. So was forgetting you even had a choice. Vanessa tried her best to do that, too.