Bryce went into the bedroom and turned on his computer. He’d send an e-mail right away and follow it up with a snailmail letter in case it didn’t get through. He wrote the e-mail to the address under the signature. Then he Googled Wayne State’s Web site. He clicked on the link.
That server is temporarily unavailable. He swore at the error message and tried again. He got it again. Then he realized that, while he had power, Wayne State might not.
Where the hell was Wayne, Nebraska? A little more Googling showed him it was about a hundred miles from Omaha, north and a bit west. Wayne State had about 5,000 students. The town of Wayne—named after Revolutionary general Mad Anthony, Wikipedia explained—had 6,000 more.
Do I really want to move there? Bryce wondered. L.A. made every other place in the world except maybe New York City, London, and Paris seem like the boonies by comparison. Wayne was the boonies: the terminal boonies, if you wanted to get technical. You’d have to make your own fun. Boy, would you ever!
And what were winters there like? L.A. had got snow every winter since the eruption. Quite a few places, these days, were getting snow in summertime. Midwestern winters hadn’t been fun before the supervolcano went off, not if you were a California kid, they hadn’t. Did Wayne do its best impression of pre-eruption Winnipeg nowadays?
How he’d handle winter wasn’t the only thing he needed to worry about. What would Susan think? Would Wayne State have a job for her, too? It didn’t seem likely. How would she feel about that?
After thinking about Susan—quite a bit after thinking about her—Bryce remembered his mother. Barbara Miller hadn’t been thrilled when he moved up to the Valley. What would she say if he went two thousand miles away?
I want you to be happy. That’s what she would say, sure as God made Greek irregular verbs. And she’d be lying through her teeth. That was what the math guys called intuitively obvious.
“One thing at a time,” Bryce muttered, fishing his phone out of his pocket. First step was finding out what Susan thought.
His stomach rumbled, loud enough to startle his cat if only he’d had one. He stuck the phone back where he’d got it. No, first step was dealing with those leftovers. Whatever Susan thought wouldn’t change a hell of a lot in the next half hour. Yes, people were animals. Better not to be a hungry animal. He headed for the kitchen.
* * *
If there was a drearier place in the world than the Torrance office of the California Employment Development Department, Louise Ferguson couldn’t imagine what it might be. The way things looked to her, Satan would have had a tough time devising a drearier place in hell.
She sat on a hard, uncomfortable plastic chair of dispirited grayish blue in the waiting area. Water ran from her umbrella and puddled on the dispirited grayish brown linoleum under her feet. She’d had to walk several blocks from the bus stop to the EDD office. Three people on the bus were sneezing their heads off. She hoped she wouldn’t come down sick.
Somebody a couple of rows behind her in the waiting area coughed as if he’d smoked four packs a day for the past thirty years. The chill and the rain made people get sick more easily than Southern Californians were used to doing. When they weren’t sneezing and hacking, they bitched about it.
Louise wished San Atanasio had an EDD office. But Torrance was the biggest South Bay city, so such things aggregated here. She had to make the long bus trip instead of a short one. If she did catch something because of that, would the EDD care? It was to laugh.
The waiting area was packed. She counted herself lucky to have a chair. Whites, African-Americans, Hispanics, East Asians, South Asians, Samoans . . . The crowd was as diverse as L.A. County. People chattered in English, Spanish, Japanese, Korean, something guttural that might have been Arabic or Farsi or Armenian for all of her, and in a language or two she couldn’t come even that close to identifying. She smelled stale sweat, stale booze, tobacco smoke clinging to clothes (you got in big trouble for trying to smoke in here), and assorted colognes and hair goops.
A middle-aged woman with a long, lined face and pulled-back hair who looked like an escapee from a 1920s elementary schoolteachers’ lounge stood up and used a bullhorn to cut through the buzz of talk: “Nine-thirty appointments! Take your places in the lines, nine-thirty appointments!”
People stood up and hustled to get into the lines that eventually put you face-to-face with an EDD clerk. A baby who’d been sound—and soundlessly—asleep while Mommy sat started screaming when Mommy got up. Mommy tried to comfort the kid, but didn’t have much luck.
Louise sat tight. She was a ten o’clock appointment. She’d got here early because that was how the bus schedule worked. Trying to jump the lines was an even worse sin than lighting a cigarette. You got an Official Black Mark on your record. A couple of those would cost you a week’s benefits.