Supervolcano All Fall Down(86)

“Yup.” Kelly nodded. “I wonder what I’d be doing if my chairman didn’t know the head of the geology department at Dominguez.”

“You’d’ve made it,” Colin said with great certainty. “You’re the kind who does. You wouldn’t’ve stuck it out for your thesis and your degree and everything if you weren’t the kind of person who tended to business. You wouldn’t’ve been out there in the cold with your darn seismograph for me to make a jerk of myself over if you didn’t take care of business.” This time, his chuckle was self-conscious—not the kind of noise he usually made.

“Best chilly morning in Yellowstone I ever had,” Kelly answered. That made him smile. He needed reassurance he was okay with women in general and with her in particular. Having Louise dump him that way left him more deeply scarred than he showed anybody but her. Chances were it left him more deeply scarred than he wanted to show himself.

Reading by candlelight was possible, but it left a lot to be desired. They went up to bed before too long. Marshall hadn’t come in yet. Kelly figured he eventually would, and she was right. She had to get up to pee in the middle of the night. The power’d come back on, too. She saw light around the edges of Marshall’s door and heard him clicking away at the Mac.

Even if it cost her a reliable babysitter, she hoped he made it as a writer. Yes, you did what you had to do. Colin was dead right about that. But if what you had to do could also be what you wanted to do, you were looking at something as close to happiness as you were likely to find in this old world.

She went back to bed. She fell asleep again as soon as her head hit the pillow. That was one more thing the baby was doing to her. She would have liked it better if she didn’t have so much trouble getting started in the morning. Coffee tasted so horrible she couldn’t stomach it. That was Junior’s fault, too. She would have been grumpier if she’d stayed awake longer.

* * *

Bryce Miller had got his share of rejection slips for things he’d written. He was resigned to that. When you wrote poems modeled after ancient Greek efforts from poets long dead by the time of Christ, you needed to get used to rejection.

But he was getting different rejections these days. He kept sending out poems. And he also kept sending out applications to every college and university that had a job opening even faintly related to the kinds of things he could do. Some of them just ignored him. Others cared enough to tell him they wanted nothing to do with him. It was a compliment . . . of sorts. He would have liked a compliment of the sort that came with paychecks attached.

It wasn’t that he hated what he was doing at Junipero High. He could still have been back at the DWP, for instance—now, that had been a crazy-making job, at least for him. He felt all throttled back, though. He was teaching so many classes and so many kids that he had no time or energy for anything that looked like scholarship. He also got tired of teaching nothing but the basics of what he knew. Sure, that was what high school was all about. He understood the problem. He got tired just the same.

So he cast his curriculum vitae upon the waters and waited to see what he would find after God knew how many days. The institutions of higher learning that did deign to answer—a bit more than half—were politely apologetic. No, they were politely hopeless. They had no openings. They were contracting, not expanding. They’d been contracting even before the supervolcano made classics and history seem even less relevant than they had back in the good times.

“At least I can do most of this by e-mail when the power’s on,” he told Susan. “It doesn’t cost me as much in postage as it would have thirty years ago.” He grinned crookedly. “And the ones who do answer tell me no a fuck of a lot faster than they could’ve in the old days.”

“Funny, Bryce. Har-dee-har-har. See? I’m laughing.” She was just finishing her own dissertation. She knew everything there was to know about Frederick II, the Holy Roman Emperor who was called Stupor Mundi: the stunner of the world. The world, unfortunately, had a new stunner now. Her chances for landing an academic job might have been better than Bryce’s, but that sure didn’t make them good.

“Hey, you’ll do it, whether I manage or not. I can be your kept man,” Bryce said.

“Right. Whatever you’re smoking, let me have some, too,” she answered. “I wonder if your high school needs two Latin teachers who can do world history, too.” Before he could say anything, she quickly added, “Yes, I’m kidding. You’re lucky Junipero needs one person in that slot.”