Mike Mullin - Ashfall

“How long has this been going on?” Uncle Paul said.

My heart was thudding, and I could feel the heat in my face, but I answered as calmly as I could, “Since we left Worthington.” I stared my uncle in the eye.

“Hmm. Get ready for breakfast.”

Darla got up and scurried toward the guest room. I plodded up the stairs to get my boots.

All day I waited for the hammer to fall. I could sense it hanging above my head, dangling from a thread like the sword of Damocles. But my uncle didn’t say anything to me except instructions about where to stack the wood that Max and I had chopped. His silence on the subject persisted until we’d finished dinner.

“I’ve talked to everyone involved today,” Uncle Paul said. “We’re going to make some changes to the sleeping arrangements. Rebecca’s moving upstairs into Anna’s room, and Alex will be moving into the guest room.”

“Dad found out you haven’t been sleeping in my room much, anyway, huh?” Max whispered to me.

“Yeah, you knew?” I whispered back.

Max smiled.

“Thanks for keeping it quiet.”

“Sure thing, cuz.”

“Alex,” Uncle Paul said, “I want to talk to you.” I stayed behind at the kitchen table while everyone else left for the warmer living room. “Um-”

“Thanks for changing the sleeping arrangements,” I said.

“Yes. Well, even I can see the obvious, sometimes. Caroline and I aren’t totally convinced it’s the right call. What if you or Darla change your mind?”

“I don’t think that will happen, but if it does, I’ll tell you, and you can change the bedrooms again.”

“Okay. Look, there’s a doctor in Warren, but without electricity and supplies, he’s pretty much practicing 1800s-style medicine. If Darla got pregnant…”

Oh, God. Not this again. My face was burning. “We aren’t doing.. . well, we’d like to. We talked about it before we even got out of Iowa. But I don’t want to add a baby to this mess any more than you do. I mean, someday maybe we’ll get married and maybe have kids, but-” I quit talking, shocked to silence by my uncle’s face. He was blushing.

“That’s, um, responsible. I know how I’d have felt about it at your age. I’m not sure I would have made the same- the right-choice. Here.” He pressed something into my hand. I looked down: two foil-wrapped squares. Condoms.

“You shouldn’t feel pressure to use them,” he said. “Abstinence is perfectly fine, preferable actually, as young as you are. But if you should… you know, I wanted you to have-“

“Thanks.”

“I can only spare two.”

“Okay.”

“And if you decide not to use them, I’d take them back.”

“Okay.” I wasn’t trying to be terse. I just had absolutely no idea what to say. Uncle Paul apparently didn’t know what to say, either, because he clapped me on my shoulder and fled the room.

I found Darla in the guest room, helping Rebecca move her stuff.

“Why are you blushing?” Darla asked me.

“Well I, um…” I looked at my sister.

“Mind giving us a minute?” Darla said.

“Sure.” Rebecca left without a peep of protest. Boy, had she changed.

I pulled the condoms out of my pocket and opened my hand to show them to Darla.

“You got…? Wow, I didn’t see that coming,” she said.

“Yeah, me neither.”

“Your uncle gave them to you?”

“Yeah.”

“Only two?”

“He said it was all he could spare.”

“Do you think they’re reusable?”

“Gross!” I said. Darla cocked an eye at me. I thought about it a moment then added, “I’ll ask.”

Darla smiled. She stepped to the guest room door, closed it, and twisted the handle to lock it. Then she took my hand and led me to the bed.

So I thought I’d feel different afterward, after the invisible neon sign proclaiming “virgin” had blinked out on my forehead. I’d spent years obsessing about it, so it seemed like something should have changed. Maybe it would have if I’d still been at Cedar Falls High surrounded by the gossip and braggadocio of teenage boys.

But on my uncle’s farm, nobody noticed, or at least nobody said anything. The next day, like every day, we dug corn, chopped wood, and carried water. And it didn’t even really change much between me and Darla, either. Yes, making love was fun, but it wasn’t really any more fun than anything we’d already been doing together. Just different.

I was glad nobody had noticed. I might have been offended if my uncle had punched my shoulder and said something inane like, “So you’re a man now.” Besides being unspeakably embarrassing, that would have missed the true date of my passage into adulthood by a month or more.

One thing did change. After Darla and I moved into the guest room, I slept better. It was colder than the living room, but I didn’t have to wake up in the middle of the night anymore to move. She was never more than an arm’s length away.

A few weeks later, another winter storm blew through. The wind ripped a series of huge holes in one of the greenhouses. Uncle Paul and Max worked on patching the plastic skin of the damaged greenhouse. From the outside, they leaned an aluminum extension ladder against one of the rafters. Paul stood at the top of the ladder, trying to tape the tears from above, while Max steadied the ladder’s base.

Most of the kale had frozen at least partially. Rebecca, Darla, and I spent the morning inside the greenhouse plucking mushy leaves off the plants. We hoped they’d survive if we excised the frozen parts.

“What a waste,” Rebecca said, plucking off another ruined leaf and dropping it into a bucket.

“At least the goats will eat well today,” Darla said.

“Yeah, but what are we going to eat?” Rebecca’s face reddened, and her hands started to tremble. “What if the storms only get worse? We could lose all the greenhouses at once. And even if the storms don’t wreck the greenhouses, it’s only getting colder. Will the greenhouses keep working? What if there’s no spring next year? What if-”

“Rebecca.” I grabbed her shoulders and gripped them gently. “Don’t think like that. We’ll make it.”

“You don’t know that. You can’t know that. I keep thinking Mom and Dad are going to come back. I look down the driveway all the time, expecting to see them walking up, but they never come. Maybe they’ll never return. Maybe they’re dead. Maybe we’ll die, too. Starve to death or freeze in this never-ending winter.” Tears rolled from her eyes.

I pulled my sister into a hug. “We won’t starve to death. Or freeze. And if Mom and Dad haven’t shown up by spring, I’ll go find them. I promise.”

Rebecca was sobbing now. Darla stepped up beside her and hugged us both.

Uncle Paul stopped his work and looked down at us through the clear plastic greenhouse roof. “You guys okay?” he shouted.

“Yeah, we’re fine,” I yelled back.

He nodded and returned to his work, stretching out to patch another hole. I heard him yell and glanced back up just in time to see his left foot slip, falling between the rungs of the ladder alongside the rafter. He overcorrected and fell, landing on the greenhouse roof with a whump and the pop of breaking plastic. The ladder twisted as he fell, violently wrenching free of Max’s hands and hitting him in the side hard enough to knock him to the ground. Uncle Paul’s left leg was trapped between the ladder and the rafter. I heard a nauseating crunch, like a bunch of celery stalks breaking at once, as Paul’s leg snapped just below the knee. He was left dangling into the greenhouse between two rafters, held upside down by his broken leg.