One Second After

“Just that, Daddy. A bunch of cars, a lot on the side of the road, some in the middle, but no jam up, just everyone stopped.”

He half-listened, while shoveling the burgers onto buns and putting them on the girls’ plates.

“Most likely the accident’s further on and people were told to pull over and wait,” he said.

The girls nodded and dug in. He ate his first burger in silence, saying nothing, just listening. It was almost eerie. You figure you’d hear something, a police siren if there was indeed an accident, cars down on old Highway 70 should still be passing by. Usually if the interstate was closed, emergency vehicles would use 70 to access the highway and it would be jammed with people trying to bypass the interstate. At the very least this was the time of night the darn Jefferson kids, up at the top of the hill, would start tearing around into the forest with their damn four-wheelers.

And then he looked up. He felt a bit of a chill.

This time of day any high-flying jets would be pulling contrails, and directly overhead was an approach corridor to Atlanta for most flights coming out of the northeast. At any given time there’d be two or three planes visible. Now the sky was sparkling blue, not a trace of a contrail.

The chill… it reminded him of 9/11. How quiet it was that afternoon, everyone home, watching their televisions, and the sky overhead empty of planes.

He stood up, walked to the edge of the railing, shaded his eyes against the late afternoon sun. Up towards Craggy Dome there was a fire burning, smoke rising vertical, half a dozen acres from the look of it. Another fire raged much farther out on the distant ridge of the Smokies.

In the village of Black Mountain, nothing seemed to be moving. Usually, before the trees filled in completely, he could see the red and green of the traffic light at the intersection of State and Main. It was off, not even blinking.

He looked back at the grandfather clock. It was usually this time of day that the “million-dollar train” came through, so named because it hauled over a million dollars’ worth of coal, mined out of Kentucky for the power plants down near Charlotte. When the girls were younger, an after-dinner ritual was to drive down to the tracks and wave to the engineer as the five heavy diesel-electric locomotives, thundering with power, pulled their load and crawled towards the Swannanoa Gap tunnel.

The silence was interrupted by a throaty growl as Grandma Jen came up l he driveway in her monster, the Edsel.

She pulled in beside his Talon, got out, and walked up.

“Damnedest thing,” she announced. “Power’s out up at the nursing home. And you should see the interstate, cars just sitting all over the place, not moving.”

“The power at the nursing home?” John asked. “What about the backup generator? That’s supposed to automatically kick in.”

“Well, the lights went out in the nursing home. I mean completely out.”

“They’re supposed to have emergency generation. That’s required,” John said.

“Never kicked on. Someone said there must be a broken relay and they’d get an electrician in. But still, it’s a worry. They had to shift patients on oxygen to bottled air, since the pumps in each room shut off. Tyler’s feeding tube pump shut off as well.”

“Is he all right?”

“He was nearly done with the feeding anyhow, so no bother. They said he’d be ok. So I go out to the parking lot and all the five o’clock shift of nurses and staff were out there, all of them turning keys, and nothing starting… but that old baby, the one you call the monster, just purred to life. Had to be here for my little girl, and that monster, as you call it, worked as it always has.”

She nodded back proudly to her Edsel.

“Can we go for a ride and see everything, Grandma?” Jennifer asked.

“What about your party?” John asked.

“No one else showed up,” Jennifer said sadly.

Grandma Jen leaned over and kissed her on the top of the head.

“Lord’s sake, child, you’re a mess.”

“They were up playing in the field.”

“And wearing your necklace when doing that?” Jen asked, horrified.

John grimaced and realized he should have made sure Jennifer had taken it off before running around with the dogs. If she had lost it or it got broken in the roughhousing with the dogs, there’d have been hell to pay.

“A burger, Jen?” he asked quickly to distract her.

She shook her head.

“Not hungry.”

“At least some cake.”

“Ok.”

He went back into the kitchen and lit the twelve candles on the cake, a special one of course, no sugar, and brought it out singing “Happy Birthday,” Pat and Jen joining in.

The other gifts were now opened, a card from Bob and Barbara Scales with a gift certificate for a hundred bucks for Amazon, the Beanies he had carried over from the wall and lined up on the table. Jennifer tucked Patriot Bear under her arm and opened the huge envelope, half as big as herself, that John had made up the night before, a collage of photos of Disney

World with a fake “Ticket for Jennifer, Daddy, and, oh yeah, Elizabeth” printed in the middle.