Chapter Twenty-Three
After she and Ben went back down into the valley, the universe seemed to take pleasure in running her ragged, which Sela supposed
was punishment for the lazy morning. She didn’t care; she’d gladly work her butt off in exchange for those hours with him.
He’d brought down an impressive collection of weapons with him, and after dropping her off at Carol’s, he left to make contact
with others in the patrol unit.
As soon as she walked into the house, she was bombarded. Carol wanted her to come into the bedroom to keep her company, which
Sela interpreted as meaning she wanted the skinny on what had or had not happened with Ben. Olivia was bored, and Sela’s arrival
freed her to make the longish walk to a friend’s house. Barb was trying to cook, clean, and take care of Carol, which even
with Olivia’s help was a lot on her plate. And laundry needed to be done.
Oh hell. Of all the things that being without electricity had made daily life more physically difficult, laundry was at the
top of the list.
“It’s a trade-off,” she said to Barb. “We can run the generator long enough to wash the clothes, then hang them to dry. Using
the generator means that down the road we’ll have less fuel for hot showers. What do we choose?”
“Washing ourselves is easier than washing clothes,” Barb said with impeccable logic.
“Done.”
They started the generator and Sela began doing the laundry. Funny—the washing machine felt like such a luxury now that she
actually enjoyed using it. When she stepped back into the living area, Barb said, “Breakfast was really good this morning.
That bacon was excellent, the best I’ve ever had.” She winked at Sela. “Too bad you missed it.”
Sela felt her face heating up, but she smiled and said, “I didn’t miss it. We had bacon, too.” We. How extraordinary, and how wonderful, that she and Ben were now we.
“What?” Carol bellowed from her bedroom.
Sela rolled her eyes at Barb. “How on earth did she hear that from her bedroom?”
“Superpower,” Barb replied, grinning. She turned back to the supper she was cooking. After her initial shock at the crisis,
and fear of the unknown, Barb had settled in; cooking was her superpower, and Sela had the thought that without her they wouldn’t be eating nearly as well as they were.
“Sela Gordon! You come give me the skinny about him right now, or I swear I’ll crawl out of this bed and come in there!”
She would, too; a determined Carol Allen was a force to be reckoned with. But Sela was chuckling as she went into Carol’s
bedroom, because it wasn’t as if she intended to keep her relationship with Ben a secret. She’d barely settled in and started
answering Carol’s barrage of questions when someone knocked on the door, then Barb and Nancy appeared in the doorway.
“We need to run something by you,” Nancy said to Sela.
And that was the real start of the busy day. Nancy, bless her, had taken it on herself to get with Mona Clausen and design
the braziers, based on an entry they’d looked up in an ancient set of World Book Encyclopedias. That was one less thing Sela had to do, but they wanted her approval. By the time that was finished and Nancy was gone,
the washer was finished with its cycle and she took the clothes outside to hang them on the clothesline to dry.
While she was doing that, a kindergarten teacher who Carol had contacted walked up and wanted to begin organizing the curriculum
for the school-in-planning. She helped Sela finish hanging the clothes, then they went inside for a four-way confab with Carol
and Barb.
Next one of the community pastors came knocking. Brother Ames was in his seventies, looked kind of like a skinny Santa Claus
now that he was growing out a white beard, and he had a lot on his mind.
“People are going to want to get married, but there aren’t any marriage licenses now. Babies will need to be recorded, but
we don’t have birth certificates—and, mark my words, starting in about seven months we’re going to have a population boom
here in the valley. When the lights go out and the television goes off, people find other ways to entertain themselves. How
do you want to handle these issues?”
Sela gaped at him. Somehow she didn’t think “community leader” was intended to be in charge of things like this. Marriages,
divorces, and births were legal issues, state issues . . . and there were no functioning local governments now. Holy crap.
It wasn’t just Brother Ames who would be asking; there were other churches in the valley, other pastors. Someone needed to
make a decision. Sela wanted to take him into Carol’s bedroom and turn him over to her aunt, but Carol was taking a nap.
There was something really serious that would be going down tomorrow, she felt as if she should be concentrating on that,
but she couldn’t breathe a word about it to anyone—and even in the middle of big drama, the small dramas of life went on.
People would be born, and people would die. There would be marriages and divorces—well, maybe not divorces, though people
could break up and stop living together—regardless of whether or not there was a functioning government, and everything needed
to be recorded.
“Get a notebook,” she said. “Or one of those big scrapbooks. It doesn’t matter what you use, but records have to be kept.
We’ll do what people did when all of this was the business of the churches, before politicians stuck their noses in. You perform
marriage ceremonies, and you record them. Same with births: they need to be written down, baptize the babies if the parents
want.”
Brother Ames looked massively relieved. “I was hoping you’d say that. We’ve been talking about this—the other pastors and
I—and that was the only way to handle the situation that we could think of, but we wanted some guidelines we could all follow,
so we’re on the same page.”
She wondered why, in that case, they hadn’t drawn up their own guidelines, but people had gotten accustomed to government
making those decisions for them. She sincerely doubted the state would have her arrested for “authorizing” a system, so she
might as well be the one to give the go-ahead. “When everything is up and running again, and that may be years, I doubt the
state will take the position that all the marriages made during that time are illicit. That would be a really stupid, unpopular
position to take. So treat everything as seriously as you would before. I can guarantee you that, as far as the people here
in the valley are concerned, any marriage ceremony you perform is just as legal without electricity as it was with it.”
“Bless you,” said Brother Ames.
Then another neighbor showed up asking about the physical therapist who had been working with Carol, because her dad was down
in his back again. Barb came to her rescue and told her about Meredith Parsons.
And so it went, for the rest of the day. Perhaps people just wanted to touch base after the traumatic events at the store,
maybe they hoped for some gossip, but every visit ate up time and, for someone like Sela who found socializing exhausting,
was very wearing. Carol woke up and wanted answers to her questions. Olivia returned, more cheerful after the time spent with
her friend.
Darkness came, Barb put supper on the table, and Ben still hadn’t returned. Sela took a meal tray in to Carol, who scowled
at her. “Where’s Ben? I want to eat at the table.”
“He had a lot to do,” Sela said, trying not to act worried, but she knew what was going on and she couldn’t help fretting.
What if Lawrence Dietrich got wind, somehow, that Ted had come to Mike? The sound of gunfire carried a long way and she thought
she’d have heard any shots, but that didn’t stop her from continually checking out the window, looking for headlights coming
down the lane. She wanted him here. She wanted to be with him.
And then he was there. She saw the reflection of headlights on the window, the sound of the big truck pulling into the driveway.
She was on the porch before he could reach it. He came up the steps and headed off any questions with a murmured, “I’ll fill
you in later,” then pulled her close with a steely arm around her waist for a hard, hungry kiss.
Barb was already setting a place at the table for him when they went inside. From her bedroom Carol called, “Ben? I need help!”
Ben looked at Sela and cocked an eyebrow. “She called me by my name. What’s up with that?”
“She wants something from you.”
“I heard that!”
“You hear everything,” Sela countered. Ben went into the bedroom and came out with Carol in his arms, and her carefully balancing
her dinner tray. He set her down at the table and took his place, eating quickly and efficiently while they chatted around
him. Things proceeded pretty much the same as they had the night before, as if a routine had been immediately established.
While Sela and Barb cleaned up after supper, he brought in enough firewood to get them through the night, and even collected
the still-damp clothes from the clothesline. He and Olivia hung the clothes where she directed, on an old folding clothes
rack that Barb had dug out of storage at her house. They tried not to use it because it took up so much room in the living
room, but sometimes it was necessary.
As he scooped Carol up to take her back into the bedroom, Sela thought of something and said, “Let me get some coffee to take
home with me.”
“I brought some from my house,” Ben said over his shoulder as he maneuvered Carol through the doorway.
“That’s good,” they heard Carol say. “I like a man who’s prepared.” There was a pause, then she continued, “What else are
you prepared for?”
“Everything, ma’am. I was a Marine. I’m prepared for everything.”
Sela buried her face in her hands, torn between groaning and laughing. She didn’t dare look at Olivia, though there was no
escaping Barb’s playful elbow jab.
“That, Sweet Buns, is the best answer you could have given.”
When he exited the bedroom he wasn’t smiling, but his eyes were crinkled with amusement.