Eruption (Yellowblown™ Book 1) (34 page)

“Thank you,” I croaked. At least it sounded like a croak to me, but he didn’t look over.

“What for?”

“For helping my family so much. We’d be a disaster if you weren’t here.”

He didn’t answer for a long time. “You’d be fine.”

Dad jogged
toward us. “The last one’s right behind me,” he wheezed.

When
he’d driven away, Boone finally looked at me. I liked his intensity yet worried about an underlying sadness he didn’t try to hide.

We were together, here and now, but for how long?

He gripped my chin with his thumb and forefinger. The force in his touch suggested passion. The kiss suggested apology.
You’re a gift I’m not going to get to keep.

I leaned my head on his shoulder
as he turned the ignition key.

Boone and I
made an early start on our bikes the next morning, escaping before someone corralled us into a project. We coasted down the hill then settled into an easy pace I knew we could maintain on the state road. I aimed for Gardenburg and our mail, driven by an underlying curiosity to see the happenings in town, what with random people sourcing water at The Perch.

“How did you sleep?” I asked.
(He’d spent the night in Grampa’s trailer.)

“Great
.” He pedaled in his usual spot off my left shoulder.

“Did you get cold?”

“Your mom gave me blankets,” he said.

“It was chilly
in the house. You had to be freezing in that tin can.”

“Maybe you’re just delicate.”

I looked back at him with arched brows. “I’ll show you delicate.” I picked up the pace. Forty-five minutes later, we wheeled along Main Street, winded, our cheeks stinging with cold.

“Phew, woman,” Boone panted
. “You found another gear this morning.”

“The delicate gear,” I reminded him.
He smacked my butt with a light flip of his fingers, the playfulness an unexpected change from his brooding last night.

The Gardenburg downtown hadn’t
been a hotbed of coolness since the 1950s. Now, even more storefronts stood empty, and chairs were propped on patio tables at the only outdoor café. The drone of a few generators carried through the crisp fall air.

Quiet and
unthreatening, nothing in Gardenburg suggested the slightest potential for the roiling waves of angry urban humanity the TV crews filmed. Thank goodness.

Inside the post office, a
bank of windows on the side wall lit the interior. A clerk with big hair, especially remarkable considering the water crisis, greeted Boone and me from behind the counter. Her eyes, with lids shadowed in frosty blue, wandered from his ruddy face down the front of his black athletic jacket. Cougar.

“I’m here for the Perch’s mail,” I said. “From Sycamore Springs.”

She sorted through some bundles. “Matt or Herbert?”

“Both, I guess. One is my dad and one my grandpa.”

She shrugged. “Normally, I’d need their permission, but you don’t look like a good candidate for mail fraud.”

She laid
two rubber-banded packs of letters on the counter. “What about the Criders? Are they near your place?”

A
sleepy uniformed man wandered out from a back room. “Sycamore Springs? That’s my route.” He started sorting through the bundles. “Here, you can take Perkins, Smith, and Rice, too.”

“Hey, hold up,” Boone said. “We rode here on bikes to get her parent
s’ mail, not to do your job for you.”

The man tugged his blue baseball hat down on his forehead, immediately defensive. “My
EMA didn’t change with the gas prices.”

“What’s an EMA?” I asked.

“Earned mileage allowance. I use my own car and gas for my route. I’m losing money every time I go.”

Boone asked,
“Still turning in your timesheet?”

Offering no denial, the postal employee
turned away. “Take the letters. Don’t take them. Makes no difference to me.”

“That’s obvious,” Boone said.

I looked at a certificate on the wall. “Where’s this Postmaster guy?” I asked the big-haired lady.

She licked her lips. “In back. I’ll get him.”

She stood aside as the Postmaster, poster boy for a Jeff Foxworthy redneck joke, meandered to the counter. The short sleeves of his uniform shirt were rolled up like a trucker’s. His smile showed only his bottom teeth. Not because he didn’t have his top teeth. His upper lip just worked that way and made me like him even less.

“I’m wondering about the Sycamore Springs mail?” I asked.

“It’s not economical to continue rural delivery.”

H
e might have been reading a cue card. I gathered I wasn’t the first disgruntled customer to cross the threshold, though I might be the first who’d been asked to deliver the mail
for
them.

“Ever?”
I asked.

“Not until gas goes down.”

“But our delivery guy’s still getting paid?” I demanded, made brave by Boone’s initial challenge.

He shifted on his feet. “Times are hard,” he said.

“No kidding. My dad sells dental supplies. Guess how many people are going to the dentist right now.” I inclined my head toward Boone. “His family lost their cattle to ash. If the driver can’t afford to come out, I get it, but are you going to let him collect a check for work he isn’t doing?”

The Postmaster shrugged. “He’s getting his base pay, no
EMA. The whole country is going to the devil anyway.”

I blinked at him. “I’m reporting you
.”

“To who?”
He hooked his thumbs in his belt loops. “You think, with the world coming to an end, anybody gives a darn whether the rural carrier to Sycamore Springs, Indiana, is delivering the mail?”

An unusual spurt of bravery flowed up in me
and made my voice shaky. “Probably not. But my mom writes for the Gardenburg Gazette, and I’ll bet the people around here will be plenty interested.”

In my head,
I saw my Dad digging a hole in our yard, and Grandma tuckered out from canning tomatoes, and the Trentons trying to keep their animals watered. “There’s still right and wrong. People have to keep doing their best, you know? We’ve got strangers coming to our house for water, trying to survive, while your mailman naps in your office. Do you feel good about that?”

“Take your feel-good lecture somewhere else, kid.”
His grimace betrayed embarrassed guilt as he returned to his office/fortress.

The clerk eased forward. “Thank you,” she whispered as she looked over her shoulder. “
They give all of us government workers a bad name.” She hesitantly pushed the two Perch bundles of mail across the counter.

My shoulders slumped
. “Who else has real letters, not junk mail?”

She shuffled through the bin. “Magazines?” she asked.

“Sure,” I said. “People need an escape.”

By the time we
left, our packs were stuffed to bursting. I’d lived in Sycamore Springs all my life, but had to backtrack a few times to find everyone’s mailbox. Finally done, we wove through the cars lined up on our driveway, our stomachs growling for a late lunch and shoulders sore from the extra weight we’d carried.

Mom met us on the porch, hands dug into her hips. “We were worried sick,” she scolded.

“Violet volunteered us for a free gig for the United States Postal Service,” Boone said.

“I tried to text you but it wouldn’t go through,” I added.

I handed Mom the mail then walked over to the glider to give Grandma hers. They both looked from their little piles back to my face. I shrugged. “The mailman is sitting on his butt. He figured if we were bringing our mail back, we might as well bring some of the neighbors’, too.”

“
Some
of the neighbors’?” Boone said, laughing. “We must have stopped at thirty houses.”

“I guess your Dudley-ness is rubbing off on me,” I retorted.

Mom smiled while Grandma nodded. “I’m proud of you,” Mom said with her head tilted and eyes shining.

“Just one thing,” Grandma said. “I don’t approve of a fine young woman like you saying th
e ‘b’ word. I’m sorry, Candy, but the language in this house….” She clicked her tongue on the roof of her mouth. “When Matthew was Violet’s age, I had a cussing board. He got a tick mark for every foul word, and then he owed me chores on the weekends.”

“When did I say the ‘b’ word?” I asked.

Mom’s eyebrows arched with amusement. “I think she means ‘butt.’”

“Grandma,” I protested. “You can’t give me a mark for the word ‘butt.’ That’s not even swearing.”

She pointed at me with a finger permanently bent at the middle knuckle. “It’s not a nice word, Miss Violet Perch, especially for a young woman. Her focus swung back to Mom. “Can we hang it in the kitchen? No need to let these youngsters get coarse because of a little ash.”

Dad poked his head out the door. “There you two are
. What happened?”

“
Delivering mail. Hey, did you have a cussing board when you were growing up?”

He burst out laughing. “Lord, I’d forgotten.”

Grandma’s jaw dropped. “Well, now,
there’s
a mark for
you
.” She shook her head with disapproval. “Taking the Lord’s name in vain, Matthew. I raised you better.”

“She wants to give me one for saying ‘butt
.’”

“Butt? She could have said ‘ass
,’ Mother.”

“Oh!” Grandma puffed. “Candy? I
’m not joking. I want a cussing board.”

Mom sighed. “We can use the dry-erase board by the phone. It’s not like we’re getting any messages lately.”

 

Demand for our spring water increased as the Gardenburg system
struggled. There were generators at the water treatment plant, of course, but fuel to run them became scarcer by the day.

Most
visitors were respectful and appreciative of our water. They chatted as they waited their turn. A few knocked on our door to ask if we could give them jugs to fill. My parents were firm. Surprisingly firm.

Mom’s tune had changed quickly after the novelty of t
he Trenton’s visit gave way to cars and strangers blocking our driveway all day long. “The water is there to take for as long as it keeps running,” Mom would tell the people who ventured toward the house. Most of them understood her tone.

Grampa
rocked on the glider on the front porch, a shotgun propped in the shadows to his left. Grandma often sat with him, her bandaged foot cradled on an old throw pillow as she watched the spectacle and visited with people she knew from church. “Don’t forget about those chickens tomorrow, Violet,” she said on Wednesday morning.

I’d completely forgotten about the chickens.
Boone and I were leaving for a mail run, since Mom’s article in the Gazette hadn’t resulted in any letters showing up in our box. I personally didn’t care about the mail—no one sent any to me, and Dad said all he and Mom got were bills—but figured if going on a bike ride, I might as well do something useful. “Okay, Grandma. I’ll be up early, like you said.”