Into the Inferno - Earl Emerson [21]
“You always say we’d sleep through a nuclear saster,” said Britney.
“Nuclear disaster, honey. And I didn’t hear my alarm.”
“Buzzing for hours,” said Allyson.
“Yup,” confirmed Britney, sighing. “I don’t know what you’re going to do about breakfast.”
“I’ll grab a bite at the station.”
“Dad, what happened to your hands?” Allyson picked up my right hand and showed it Britney.
“Oh, ick,” said Britney as the front doorbell rang. “Looks like you got into the Elmer’s Glue.” She rolled off the bed and sprinted for the front door. “That’s Morgan.”
“Don’t open up to strangers,” I said.
“You know who it is, Dad,” Allyson said.
Morgan was sixteen and lived next door. Baby-sitting for me was an easy-money summer job for her and a pleasant experience for my girls, partly because she looked on them as contemporaries and shared her secrets about boys and high school, partly because she brought over makeup and showed them how to apply it. Seven and nine, going on seventeen and nineteen, my girls shared a thousand little confidences with Morgan that I wasn’t supposed to know about, including the fact that Morgan had a crush on me.
We were in the same house the girls and I had lived in with Lorie, a rambler on two and a half acres just north of the main section of town. A fixer-upper that had taken five years to bang into shape. When the girls came along, Lorie quit work and our budget became strained at about the same pace as our relationship.
We’d never had water in the basement, but for the last three years during the spring or early winter the Snoqualmie River, normally two hundred yards distant, flooded the road in front of our house. Three years ago when it flooded, I bunked at the firehouse, Lorie and the girls at the mayor’s place on the other side of town. That was when I should have guessed about the mayor and Lorie.
We lived at the end of a short dirt road. Morgan Neumann and her mother lived next door on five acres, a well-worn path between the houses. A vacant field buffered us from the two-lane paved road. To the south there were horses on leased land, untended apple trees squatting here and there in the surrounding fields, a few alders, and at least one tall pine.
Our most recent topic of conversation around the dinner table was whether or not Allyson could have a horse. At nine, I didn’t feel she was old enough to take care of it, and with two girls and Eustace, our cat, under my wing already, I didn’t need the extra chores. Still, the folks at work had a pool going that there’d be a horse in our pasture before the year was out. Sometimes I thought the guys at work knew me better than I knew myself.
When I climbed out of bed, my legs felt weak and jittery, as if I’d been running uphill all night, but then after I got moving my thighs began to regain some of their strength. My head was throbbing.
Standing over the toilet bowl, I saw that the backs of both hands were scaly, as if they’d been sunburned and were peeling, except they weren’t. I washed and dried my hands, but the waxy-looking substance wouldn’t come off. Hand lotion didn’t help.
“Morning, Mr. Swope,” said Morgan Neumann when I went downstairs, still rubbing my hands.
“Morning, Morgan. There’s twenty dollars on the fridge if you need groceries. I’ll be at the station if you want to get hold of me. Unemployment Beach is not okay, but a video from Blockbuster is. G or PG.”
“Daddy, I want to go to the beach,” Allyson said.
“Not without me. That current’s faster than it looks. It’ll sweep you away like a bug on a rug.”
“We don’t need no video, Daddy,” Britney said.
“You don’t need a video.”
“That’s what I said. We’re going to play house.”
“No, we aren’t,” Allyson said. “We’re going to mop the kitchen floor, and then I’m going to read my book. Morgan’s going to surf the Internet.”
“I am not,” Morgan protested.
“It’s okay, Morgan. Just don’t let the house burn down.”
“Thank you, Mr. Swope. You’re the greatest.” Knowing Morgan had a pinch of Eddie Haskell in her, I was always a little leery when she turned on the applause spigot.