Eruption (Yellowblown™ Book 1) (22 page)

“Violet says we met you on her first day last year?” She spoke with an unusual lisp, reminding me of the root canal she’d had.

“Yes, ma’am. I’m sorry, those move-in days get blurry.”

“This is Sara.” I pointed to my busty sister, disrespectfully taller than me, and even prettier since I left, with a fall of naturally highlighted chestnut hair she could twist into a lopsided knot on the top of her head and still look like a runway model. She was a cheerleader and dated the star basketball player since last winter. I suspected by the familiar way he’d been touching her at the end of the summer they’d started having sex.

“Hey
, Sara,” Boone said, not leaving her out of the handshakes.

“So, wow,” Dad exclaimed, walking to the back of the truck. “Good idea to have some extra gas. Did you have any trouble?”

“As a matter of fact, somebody got interested in this at a rest stop. Violet scared him off.”

“Oh my goodneth
!” Mom exclaimed, with more drama than the story required.

“I didn’t scare anybody
. The thief kept unhooking bungee cords until Boone showed up.”

“
Come in while you tell your story,” Mom chirped “We can unload later, can’t we?”

“Sure,” Boone said. He clicked the locks on the truck
with the keychain remote.

Sara looked up from the text on her phone.
“You don’t have to lock it here,” she said with a laugh.

Boone tucked the keys in his pocket.
“If you’d been on our Sunday shopping trip, you’d lock it.”

“I’ll say
.” I walked next to him, liking how he kept saying “we” and “our.” “We cleaned out some inventory in three stores.”

“I can’t wait to see what you were able to find,” Mom said, though
see
came out like
thee
.

“Mom,
how’s your mouth?” I asked.

“
Sore.”
Thor.

“Did it go ok
ay?”

“Who knows?” she replied
with a lopsided grin. “These pain killers make me a little loopy. I hope dinner’s edible.”

She led us through the modest foyer
with the rack of five hooks for keys. The wall behind bore dents and scars from years of taking and replacing our individual sets of house and car keys. The fifth hook held spares, the garage key, and oddballs like Grampa and Grandma’s housekey.

Our
eat-in kitchen, with its neutral so-not-granite counters and dark wood cabinets, smelled of oven-fried chicken. The table setting included Mom’s favorite tablecloth, a tasteful floral she said made her feel she’d journeyed to Tuscany.

“Wow, Mom, you didn’t have to go
to all this trouble.” I traced my finger over the pattern.

Compliments for
the table evaporated when my peripheral vision caught a flash of silver from the rarely used formal dining room. I flicked the wall switch for the wrought iron chandelier, now sadly out of place in a space resembling the storage area of a restaurant kitchen.

“Good Lord,” I muttered.

Three rows of wire shelves contained food, batteries, packets of seeds, paper products, gallons and gallons of bleach, blankets, enough vitamins to poison an elephant, and enough first aid supplies to stock the Gardenburg ER.

“Seriously, Mom?”

She looked embarrassed. “I know. I hope we won’t need any of it, but every day the eruption continues….” She lisped to the same sad conclusion the Western Case College administration had reached.

I shook my head as s
he pulled me into another hug. “Ooh, you’re finally home. We’ve been so worried.” She turned to Boone who checked out her insane storage room from the safety of the doorway. “Thank you for bringing her, and for helping her get some things for my crazy stockpiling.”

“
No problem.” He thrust his hands in the front pockets of his jeans. “I enjoyed having company for a change.”

“Let me show you
your room, and then I’ll get dinner on the table.”

I shadowed
their journey down the hall. Mom pointed out the full bath on one side of the hall and the master bedroom on the other before ending at the minuscule guest room all the way in back. It had twin beds, a bench for a suitcase, a narrow closet and very little else. A set of pristine white towels was neatly folded on one of the beds.

“The girls’ rooms are upstairs,” Dad said from the hall
, about as subtle as Mia, only with the opposite goal.

“Let’
s eat,” Mom said.

At dinner,
Dad grilled Boone about his major and his family then required a thesis on how a Nebraska boy found Western Case College. Having sorted that out, Dad went on to question him about his plan to go home tomorrow.

I bit my tongue through the entire meal.

Boone wiped his mouth with a floral napkin. “I haven’t talked to my parents in over a week, sir. I hoped to use your land line to give them another try tonight.”

“There’s an extension in the kitchen you’re welcome to any time.
Unlimited long distance.”

Once Dad gave him a chance to eat,
Boone took seconds of everything, and I don’t think he was just being polite. The meal seemed pale to me. Chicken, mashed potatoes and gravy, applesauce, and baking mix biscuits. Mom mostly ate potatoes and applesauce.

“Were you able to get the clear plastic?” Mom asked.

“Yep,” I said.

“
Oh, that’s so great. We planted some cold weather vegetables but they need a greenhouse.”

“I told you,” Sara said when we shared a sisterly our-parents-are-whacko look.

“It took some elbow grease,” Mom said, ignoring us.

“
I’ll bet you have some deer pressure,” Boone interjected.

“We
will,” Mom said. “There’s a neighbor with a…oh, what’s it called?” She made a cork-screw motion with her finger, “…oh, yes, a post-hole auger coming up tomorrow so we can put in some fencing. We’ve never had a garden here, but Matt’s parents are giving us pointers.”

“And tools,” Dad added with a chuckle. He and
Mom rose to clear the table. Boone stood up, too.

“I’ve had
some experience with fencing. I can help with the posts, maybe get the plastic framed out before I go tomorrow,” he offered as he sat his plate by the sink.

Dad seemed especially relieved to have an experienced hand at his disposal. “
We’d sure appreciate that. You probably shouldn’t rush west anyway.”

Boone and I helped to clean up, then
he stayed in the kitchen to call home while the rest of us went to the living room. The cold black cube of a wood stove squatted on a hastily arranged square of patio pavers in front of the fireplace, its exhaust pipe disappearing into what used to be a cozy fireplace. The chimney now served as the receptacle for the waste fumes of a more efficient heat source.

I told Sara about Gloria’s new home, relieved when she said she didn’t mind. The stuffed animal, at the time it had been given to me, me
ant something significant. To her, my treatment of Gloria reflected proportionally my sisterly affection, and woe to me if the hippo fell unnoticed between my bed and the wall, or had an eye twisted slightly out of alignment. Tonight, hopefully, Gloria helped a frightened girl with pink boots fall asleep, wherever she was.

I
heard Boone start to leave a message and scooted back into the kitchen to scribble our phone number down for him to repeat.

After he hung up
, he shrugged. “I left a voicemail this time, at least. Thank goodness Mom got the electronic mailbox from the phone company so it works whether the power is on at the house or not.”

“Hopefully
, Drew will get through to them, too,” I said. “Or maybe he already has.” Boone’s older brother hadn’t been heard from. The worry weighed Boone down. His eyes became sort of haunted when we talked about Drew, though every conversation ended with our mutual reassurances he faced no dangers in Alaska not already inhabiting the place when he got there.

As we unloaded supplies,
I felt guilty at Mom’s praise for my shopping success since I’d done nothing but silently castigate her bizarre requests. She was downright chipper as she stocked all the over-the-counter medications and ointments I’d scored. She flipped seed packets by the corners like single-serve envelopes of hot chocolate mix ready to be poured into a steaming mug of hot water on a frigid winter day.

Boone handed the box of ammunition to Dad
who secreted the cartridges off to some special storage area for items of deadly force. Mom assigned everything but the tampons a spot in the dining room-cum-storage area or the garage, which, it turned out, was like the dining room on steroids. Every square inch of floor space not stacked with firewood or filled with all the hastily rearranged junk that always lived in our garage now held prepper supplies. Mom caught me bent in half, verifying the demotion of our dining room table, visible only at the legs, and unceremoniously shoved in a corner, its surface covered with an old sheet and stacked with bags of fertilizer.

“
Taking up bomb-making?”

“No
. Though if anything around here is going to blow up, I wish it would be that table. Hand-me-down from Nana’s move to Florida. I’ve never liked it, but she said it’s an heirloom.”
 

Text to Mia:

 

The whoosh of Sara starting the shower in the upstairs bathroom woke me. I stared at the sloping ceiling of my room, where the shadows of leaves and branches decorated the butter-yellow in the lacy network of sunlight piercing the forest before entering my window. I never closed the simple muslin curtains ’cuz someone would have to be fifteen feet up in a tree to look into my room.

I did a much better job of primping for the day than I usually would and
found Boone at the kitchen table with a syrup coated plate and a mug of coffee in front of him. His damp hair lay forward and spiked in all the right places, and I resisted the urge to poke my fingers in it to mess it up.

My heart clenched
. He planned to leave today. The eruption continued on Day 29, according to the morning show blaring from the living room, further removing hopes we’d be returning to our budding romance any time soon. I turned toward the coffeepot to hide my grimace.

Sara moped and whined about going to school while the rest of us got to stay home.
“They even cancelled the football game tonight.”

After
walking Sara down the driveway to make sure she got on her bus, Dad pulled a cluster of metal “U”s out of the garage to signal the commencement of the garden operation. I cradled a second cup of coffee as I picked my way across dewy grass.

Tiny
markers punctuated the rows of tilled earth. The wee signs announced Mom and Dad’s hopes for broccoli, kale, cabbage, cauliflower, carrots, spinach, lettuce, and chard. (Chard sounded even less promising than kale.) Some of the rows flaunted bright green sprouts already, though. Mom directed Dad and Boone to the lettuce and spinach row first, where they sunk the “U”s, comprised of two half-circles separated by a three or four inch cross brace for stability. Clear plastic draped across these made a tiny tubular greenhouse over the row. Boone and Dad unearthed some old bricks behind the garage to weigh down the edges at intervals.