“Sure. And when we talk shop in the restaurant downstairs, everybody can look at us like we’re nuts.” Daniel clucked and caught himself. “Nah. Most of the people in there’ll be nuts the same way we are. Say, half past eight?”
“Sounds good. I’m scheduled for ten thirty. That’ll give us plenty of time to eat, and then I can be nervous afterwards.” Kelly knew she was kidding on the square. She’d critiqued other people’s papers before, but this was her first big presentation on her own. The room would be packed, too. There wasn’t anything more urgent in the field, and there wouldn’t be for years, maybe centuries, to come.
“Okay. I know that song.” Daniel grinned crookedly. He’d snagged a tenure-track job at Montana State while she was still in grad school. Had she been jealous? Oh, just a little, especially since he was younger than she was. Now he went on, “Let’s meet in the lobby. That way, whoever gets here first can gawp at the ceiling till the other one shows.”
“You do that, too? Oh, good! I wondered if I was the only one. Isn’t it over the top?” Kelly said.
As it happened, neither one of them beat the other; they rode down in the same elevator. A couple of people were eating breakfast in the hotel restaurant, but only a couple. A sharp-faced, officious middle-aged woman in a fuzzy orange sweater waved away other would-be customers. “We can’t serve you now,” she said. “We’re setting up for Sunday brunch.”
“We don’t want brunch. We just want breakfast,” Kelly protested.
“There are people in there,” Daniel added.
“We can’t take you now,” the woman in the orange sweater repeated, and she would not be moved.
Dejected, decaffeinated, and pissed off, Kelly and Daniel walked up the stairs to the ornate lobby. “Where can we get something to eat in this miserable town?” Kelly growled at a desk clerk. “Your restaurant seems to be under a curse.”
“A curse in an orange sweater,” Daniel agreed.
The clerk blinked, but she said, “There’s the Original, a block up Sixth.”
“Let’s go,” Kelly said grimly. Out the revolving door they strode. Kelly was wearing long johns, and damn glad she’d put them on. The wind had knives in it. Snow crunched under her shoes. It drifted here and there. Not many cars were on the street. Chains made the ones that were rattle as they slowly went by. It was more like a scene from Duluth than anything anyone would have looked for in Portland before the eruption.
Decor in the Original lived up to its name. The paintings on the walls were of clowns and mayonnaise jars—together, not separately. Contemplating what use the swarms of Bozoids might have for all that Best Foods made Kelly queasy. Coffee and ham and eggs and hash browns worked wonders, though. Daniel had sausage and eggs instead.
When they were finishing up, he took his iPhone out of his pocket to check the time. Kelly looked a question at him. “Nine forty,” he said. “Unless the grizzlies carry us off between here and the Benson, you’re golden.”
“Okay. Thanks. For a while there, I was too mad at that orange bitch to worry about what I’m going to say, you know?” Kelly said. “Maybe I owe her something after all.”
“A kick in the teeth?” Daniel suggested.
“I’d love to. People might talk, though.” Kelly sighed, as if to say there was no accounting for society’s foibles. When the tattooed waiter brought the check, she grabbed it. Daniel started to squawk, but she cut him off: “Hey, how long did I spend at your place after things blew up?”
“I dunno, but I bet it seemed like forever,” he answered, which wasn’t so far wrong. Even so, he let her put it on her Visa.
They walked back to the Benson through the arctic chill. Kelly changed into business attire. Pants hid the long underwear. A wool turtleneck under a jacket kept her top half tolerably warm. She grabbed the manila folder that held the paper and headed down the hall to the elevator again.
The packed function room intimidated her less than she’d feared it would. Standing up and lecturing her Dominguez Hills classes had burned the fear of public speaking out of her. And she’d have a much more interested audience here than she did there.
Her chairperson introduced her as “Somebody who knows the Yellowstone supervolcano better than anyone. If she’d been any closer to it when it did erupt, she wouldn’t be here talking to us now.” Geoff Rheinburg might have been stretching the first part of that. He sure wasn’t kidding about the second half.
Kelly had to adjust the mike at the lectern before she started talking; Rheinburg was several inches taller than she was. “I am glad to be here—and you can take that any way you want,” she said. In the second row, Daniel nodded emphatically. He knew how she felt, all right. And yes, Larry Skrtel and Ruth Marquez were here, too, farther back in the crowd. They’d also got out in the nick of time. And they were sitting side by side now, which was, or at least might be, interesting.