Supervolcano: All Fall Down

She grabbed the first magazine in the rack and sat down to look at it. It was Vegetarian Times, hardly something she would have chosen if she’d been paying attention. Teo had talked about not eating meat any more-an aerobics instructor feared fat even more than he feared the IRS. But he’d never done more than talk. He needed protein to stay strong. And, just as much to the point, meat tasted so good.

Well, she didn’t need to worry about Teo any more. Except, of course, for the small detail he’d given her to remember him by, the detail that was getting bigger by the day and would pop pretty soon. Yeah, except for that, she thought.

One of the other women got called into an examination room, then the second. A Hispanic gal came in. She was older than both of those two-in her thirties somewhere. She still gave Louise a look that said You gotta be jiving me.

Louise stared stonily back. In your ear, lady. The Hispanic woman looked away first. She sat down and started texting on her BlackBerry.

The door to the back part of the office opened. “You can come in now, Ms. Ferguson,” the receptionist said.

“Happy day.” Louise levered herself out of the chair with one arm. She wasn’t sorry to put Vegetarian Times back in the rack. It was a sad little magazine, skinny and printed on crappy paper. Who would have thought the supervolcano could screw up something like that? It did, though, along with so much else.

A nurse took charge of Louise. “Why don’t we climb on the scales?” she said.

“We? You’re getting on with me?” Louise said. The nurse (her name was Terri-Louise felt proud of herself for remembering) laughed. It wasn’t that funny, but then, neither was Terri’s assumption that, because she was having a baby, she was also turning back into one.

She got on the scale. She weighed. . what she weighed. She wondered how much would come off after the kid finally emerged. She wondered if any would. One more thing to worry about. It wasn’t even close to the top of her list-and, when she couldn’t worry too much about her weight, that was one honking list.

Terri led her into an examination room and took her temperature and her blood pressure. The nurse wrote in the chart. “What are they?” Louise asked.

“Both normal,” Terri answered after a moment’s pause. The nerve of some people, wanting to know their own numbers! Louise had seen that attitude before in other nurses. Terri went on, “Dr. Suzuki will see you in a few minutes.” Out she went.

There was a magazine rack in the examination room, too, but the only magazine in it was a Car and Driver from before the eruption. Louise was more interested in it than in jumping out the window into the parking lot, but not much more. She left it in the rack. She wouldn’t die of boredom before the doctor came in.

And in he swept, Terri in his wake to keep the proprieties proped or whatever. He reminded her of Mr. Sulu from Star Trek. His weapons of choice, though, were rubber gloves, not photon torpedoes. “How are you feeling today?” he asked briskly.

“Like the Goodyear Blimp. How else am I gonna feel?” she retorted. He laughed. She added, “And I do wish he’d come out and get it over with. I’m sick of lugging him around.”

Dr. Suzuki nodded. How many times had he heard variations on that theme? Probably from every woman close to her due date. He glanced into the chart. “Your numbers have been good all along. Your BP is low. You’ve never had protein in your urine or anything like that. It should be a normal delivery. We will be extra careful, though. I don’t mean to offend you, but at your age we can’t take anything for granted.”

“I’m not offended. I know how old I am. I’d better,” Louise said.

“Er-yes.” Dr. Suzuki didn’t seem to know what to make of that. Was I so dry before I married Colin, or did it rub off from him? Louise wondered. Chances were it had rubbed off. She still thought of anything peculiar as nutso because of Wes Jones. And he was just the guy who’d lived across the street, not somebody who’d fathered her three children.

Three out of four now, she thought.

Dr. Suzuki tried again: “If anything seems even a little out of the ordinary, call me or go to the hospital right away. Don’t waste time and don’t take chances. Do you understand?”

“I can’t very well not understand that, can I?” Louise returned sharply.

He rolled his eyes. “Ms. Ferguson, you’d be amazed.”

And that was bound to be true. If anybody learned never to underestimate the power of human stupidity, someone who’d been married to a cop for a long time sure would. The armed robber who’d left his driver’s license on the counter of the liquor store he’d knocked over but who seemed surprised anyway when he got busted. . The gal who’d stabbed her husband in the neck over a six-pack of Big Red chewing gum. . Oh, the list went on and on.

“Well, I hope I’m not dumb that way, anyhow,” Louise said.

“Okay, fair enough.” Dr. Suzuki nodded. “I’ll see you again in two weeks or when your contractions start, whichever comes first.”

Louise made the appointment with the receptionist. Whether she’d keep it, as the OB-GYN had said, was more up to Junior than to her. The doctor’s office was in a better part of town than the ramen works. It didn’t have, or need, a fortified parking lot. Louise sighed. She remembered the days when no business in San Atanasio did.

Which proved. . what, exactly? That the world changed whether she liked it or not? That she wasn’t so young as she had been once upon a time? All of the above? The baby kicked inside her as she got into her car. “Stop that,” she told him, not that he listened. She wasn’t too old to get pregnant. She’d thought she was, but nooooo. Life was full of surprises, wasn’t it? Uh-huh. You betcha.

When she walked into the ramen place, Patty asked her, “How you doing?” In the old days, Patty would have been a man with a green eyeshade. What she couldn’t do with and to numbers couldn’t be done.

“Except for this”-Louise patted her front bumper-“I’m fine.”

“Yeah. Except.” Patty would have to fill Louise’s slot, too, when Louise had the baby. It wasn’t that she couldn’t. She could do the job better than Louise could; she’d taught it to Louise. But she couldn’t stand Mr. Nobashi-he drove her nutso.

As soon as Louise got back to her desk, he yelled for a Coke and a danish. He ran on them. Why he didn’t have diabetes, Louise couldn’t imagine. Not from lack of effort, that was for sure. Fetching the stuff for himself would have been beneath a Japanese boss’ dignity. Having a massively pregnant woman do it for him wasn’t.

All things considered, Patty had a point.

Once she’d supplied Mr. Nobashi with his early-afternoon sugar and caffeine, Louise went back to figuring inventories and sales trends. It wasn’t what you’d call exciting. Well, if she wanted excitement, all she had to do was wait till Junior came out. He’d take care of that for her. Oh, wouldn’t he just!

III

The door to Marshall Ferguson’s room had a strip of yellow police tape running diagonally across it. CRIME SCENE-DO NOT CROSS was printed on it in big black block letters. Like any newly returned college graduate living in a house with his father and his father’s new wife, he was sensitive about his privacy.

Unlike some, he realized they were sensitive about theirs, too. And they didn’t pry. He could even smoke dope in there if he didn’t make it too obvious he was getting wasted. For somebody whose dad was a cop, that was a small, or maybe not such a small, miracle.

About the only thing his father required of him was that he sit in front of his computer for a couple of hours every day, working on whatever he was working on. “Look,” Colin Ferguson said, “I know turning into a writer doesn’t happen overnight. But it doesn’t happen if you don’t work at it, either. So you’ll work.”

Marshall resented that, but not as much as he might have. He was old enough to have got past the teenage thing of being sure anything his old man said was bullshit just because his old man said it. But he did bristle when his dad suggested-no, ordained was the better word-that he pay a third of whatever he made as rent.