Susan Pfeffer - This World We Live In

“That’s how you got here?” I asked. “Dad and Lisa and Charlie, too? By car?”

“Some,” Alex said. “Some we biked and some we walked. Julie and I got a lift partway to Tulsa in February. That was a big help. Then we left Tulsa to find Carlos in Texas. His Marine regiment is stationed there. By the time we located him, we knew everything we needed to survive.”

I knew I’d ask about Tulsa later, but the important thing was getting all the food back home. “I had an idea,” I said. “See that window? I could toss the cartons to the ground. They’re cans and boxes, so nothing would break.”

“Great idea,” Alex said. “You stay here and do the tossing. I’ll go down, and when you’re through, we’ll load the van.”

At first I resented the idea that I’d do all the heavy lifting, but then I realized Alex would be outside with the shotgun. He and Julie knew how to defend themselves, but no one had bothered to teach me. “Fair enough,” I said.

We shattered open the window, and Alex watched as I threw a box down. “Good work,” he said. He picked up one of the bags of rice and carried it down while I kept tossing the boxes out the window. A couple of them flew open, but mostly they held.

It took a while for me to get them all down, and I was exhausted by the time I’d finished, but the job was only partly done. We still had to get three bags of rice outside, and we couldn’t toss them. Alex came back, and we each took one. I had no idea how heavy twenty pounds could be. Alex handed me the shotgun, then went to the attic and got the final bag.

The van looked really old, and its windows had been whitewashed so you couldn’t see in. But it held everything, except our bikes. Those Alex and I strapped to the top with rope he’d found.

The sound of the engine turning over was just amazing. The sensation of being in a van that actually moved was beyond description.

“Do you know how to get back?” I asked. “Or should I direct?”

“I’ll need your directions,” Alex said. “I try to remember landmarks, but this country all looks the same to me.”

So I told him where to turn. There were no other cars on the road, and no one came out at the sound of ours. I was relieved, since Alex had given me the shotgun and I was terrified I’d be expected to use it.

“Who was in Tulsa?” I asked. “Or did you just pass through there?” It was easier to ask Alex questions with us both facing forward with no danger of eye contact.

“We thought we’d find our aunt and uncle,” Alex said. “They set out for there last June. We spent a few days looking but no luck.”

“It’s hard to picture cities,” I said. “Cities with people.”

“They’re not like before,” Alex said. “There are bodies, mostly skeletons now, piled up. Even the rats have died. And only some buildings have heat, so you share apartments.”

“Are there schools?” I asked, remembering my idea about places for politicians and millionaires to live. “Hospitals? Could you and Julie have stayed there?”

Alex held on to the steering wheel a little tighter. “The plan was for me to leave Julie with our aunt and uncle. I was going to get to Texas, find Carlos, let him know where we were, and then go back and work at the oil fields. But I couldn’t leave Julie alone, so we went to Texas together.”

“But you didn’t stay,” I said. “Couldn’t you have worked in the Texas oil fields instead?”

“I could have,” Alex replied. “But there was no one to look after Julie.”

“Julie’s a good kid,” I said. “She wouldn’t have gotten into trouble.”

“Trouble would have found her,” Alex said. “We couldn’t take that risk.”

I considered asking him about the convent, but I didn’t want to remind Alex that he’d caught me eavesdropping. “Could Dad and Lisa have stayed?” I asked instead. “Not necessarily in Tulsa. But in a city somewhere? Could Dad have gotten work?”

“Maybe,” Alex said. “Maybe not. It’s all physical labor. But the only thing that mattered to him, besides Lisa and the baby, was getting home to you. He talked so much about you, I felt like I knew you before we ever met. You were on your swim team, and before that you used to figure skate, and you played Glinda the Good in your fourth grade play.”

“He told you all that?” I asked.

“And more,” Alex said. “About all of you.”

I thought about Dad, about how I’d even for a moment thought he could love anyone like he loves us, and I felt happy and guilty at the same time. But mostly I felt grateful to Alex, even though there was no way he could know how much his comment meant to me.

“Can I ask you a question now?” he said.

“Absolutely,” I said. LLBA was asking me a question.

“The bruises on your face,” he said. “When we got here a week ago, they were pretty bad. How did you get them?”

It’s nice to know the first thing he’d noticed about me was my ravishing collection of black-and-blue marks. “I took a header off my bike,” I said.

“Oh,” he said. “Julie and I had a bet going.”

“Who won?” I asked, trying to keep the irritation out of my voice.

“We both lost,” Alex said. “Her money was on you and Syl having a fight. Mine was on Matt slugging you one.”

“Matt’s never hit me,” I said. “We weren’t brought up like that, like animals.”

“Neither were we,” Alex said. “You don’t have to be an animal to hit your sister.”

“Not in my household,” I said, sounding exactly like Mom.

“Fine,” Alex said, sounding exactly like me.

We drove the rest of the way in silence, except for when I told him to make a turn. But it was hard for me to stay sulky when I was so excited about all the food we were bringing back in our very own van with its very own containers of gas.

Mom and Lisa stayed inside, trying to find places for all the cartons, while the rest of us carried in the food. The excitement was contagious. Charlie sang “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’,” and Julie danced around, and Matt and Syl grabbed each other, and Dad cried with joy.

And I discovered that Alex knows how to smile.

You’d think with a houseful of food for the first time in a year, we’d be eating nonstop. Oh no. Not us.

First off, Matt pointed out that what seems like an enormous amount of food now is going to vanish in the blink of an eye with ten people eating it. Okay, he didn’t say “in the blink of an eye.” He said that if we each ate four ounces of rice a day, we’d finish the four twenty-pound bags in a month.

Four ounces of rice sounds like a lot of rice to me. And there’s all that other food we brought back, plus the food we get each week, plus whatever shad is still in the garage. But Mom agreed with Matt that we’d have to be very careful to stretch out our supplies for a long time.

Then Charlie—Mr. Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’— pointed out that some of the food might have spoiled, and it would be a disaster if we came down with food poisoning at the same time.

He suggested we become food buddies (that was his exact term, “food buddies”), and every morning two of us could take a nibble from one kind of food and two of us from another, etc., and then if we didn’t get sick, we could all eat the food we’d started that morning.

Matt and Syl said they’d be food buddies, and Jon volunteered himself and Julie, which left Alex and me. Dad and Charlie said they’d food-buddy, also, and we agreed Mom and Lisa shouldn’t risk it.

This morning Alex and I each had a bite of canned mushrooms, and Jon and Julie had a bite of beef jerky, and Matt and Syl had a bite of canned carrots, and Dad and Charlie had a sip of vegetable soup.