Sunshine

I went to bed wearing my oldest, most faded flannel shirt, the bra that had looked all right in the catalog but was obviously an escapee from a downmarket nursing home when it arrived, white cotton panties that had had pansies on them about seven hundred washings ago and were now a kind of mottled gray, and the jeans I usually wore for housecleaning or raking Yolande’s garden because they were too shabby for work even if I never came out of the bakery. Food inspector arrest-on-sight jeans. Oh, and fuzzy green plaid socks. It was a cool night for summer. Relatively. I lay down on top of the bedspread.

And slept through till the alarm at three-forty-five. He hadn’t come.

That was not one of my better days at work. I snarled at everyone who spoke to me, and snarled worse when no one snarled back. Mel, who would have, wasn’t there. Mom, fortunately, didn’t have time to get into a furious argument with me, so we shot a few salvos over each other’s bows, and retired to our separate harbors.

We did try to stay out of each other’s way but it wasn’t like Mom to avoid a good blazing row with her daughter when one was offered. What had she been guessing while I’d been doing my guessing? There was quite a lot in the literature of bad crosses about petty, last-straw exasperations that tipped the balance. I’d been checking globenet archives when I could have been reading Sordid Enchantments.

“I’m not a goddam invalid!” I howled at Charlie. “I don’t need to be treated with gloves and—and bedpans! Will you please tell me I’m being a miserable bitch and you’d like to upend a garbage bin over my head!”

There was a pause. ‘Well, the idea had crossed my mind,“ said Charlie.

I stood there, buttery fists clenched, breathing hard. “Thank you,” I said.

“Anything you want to talk about?” Charlie said in his best offhand manner.

I thought about it. Charlie ambled over and closed the bakery door. Doors don’t get closed much at the coffeehouse, so when one is, you’d better not open it for anything less than a coachload of tourists who didn’t book ahead, have forty-five minutes for lunch before they meet their guide at the Other Museum, which is a fifteen-minute coach ride away (it’s only seven minutes on foot, but try to convince a coachload of tourists of that), they all want burgers and fries and won’t look at the menu, we’re not heavily into burgers so our grill is kind of small, and we don’t do fries at all, except on special, when they’re not what burger eaters would call fries anyway.

This really happened once, and by the time Mom got through with that tour company the president was on his knees, offering her conciliatory free luxury cruises for two in the Caribbean, or at least all future meal bookings of his tour groups when they came to New Arcadia, made well in advance. She accepted the latter, and the Earth Trek Touring Company (the president’s name is Benjamin Sisko, but I bet that wasn’t the one he was born with, and you should see the logo on their coaches) was now one of our best customers. We could almost retire on what they brought us in August. And we taught his regular tour leaders how to find the Other Museum on foot. This made the coach drivers love us too.

This is not what the city council had in mind when they were drooling over the prospect of seeing New Arcadia on the new post-Wars map, but the Other Museum is why coachloads of the kind of tourists who sign up with a company called Earth Trek now come to New Arcadia. The public exhibits are still lowest common denominator, but there are more of them than there used to be, and the Ghoul Attack simulation is supposed to be especially good: yuck-o, I say. We do also have a few more prune-faced academics on teeny stipends renting rooms in Old Town, but it’s nowhere as bad as I’d feared. The proles win again. Ha.

Charlie ambled back from closing the door and sat on the stool in the corner. It wasn’t so hot a day that we were going to die of being in the bakery with the ovens on and the door closed tor at least ten minutes.

“Because of the other night,” I said, “the SOF guys want me to be a kind of—unofficial SOF guy.”

Charlie said carefully, “I didn’t think a table knife was…usual.”

I sighed. “What did you think, when you followed me out there that night? Just that I’d lost my mind?”

Charlie considered this before he answered. “I thought something had snapped, yes. I didn’t think it was your mind…But I didn’t have much time to think. By the time I got there it was all over. And I guess I realized then that I’d, we’d, had the wrong end of the…table knife all along.”

“Since I disappeared for a couple of days.”

“Yeah. It had to be the Others, one way or another. Sorry. It just…the way you were… you didn’t want to talk to any cops, but you really didn’t want to talk to SOF.”

I hadn’t thought it was that noticeable.