“You’re sure you’ve got your mask on properly?” Pel asked.
“Yes, Mom,” Jules nodded, “for the fifth time, yes, I’m sure. We watched the video together, remember?”
Jules was fine with her mother pestering her three times about it. It was deadly serious, and Jules knew her mother was genuinely concerned about her well-being. But there wasn’t any point in pressing the matter more than three times, and it was starting to stress Jules out, and that, my teenage daughter could not abide.
Jules didn’t need to have a neuropsychiatrist as a father to know that stress led to bullshit. And bullshit benefitted no one except the chaos.
Pel tapped the screen of the dashboard console as she turned the car around the corner.
“C’mon, Genneth.” Pel tapped the screen again. “Pick up.”
For a second time, my wife’s videophone call dialed through, and for a second time, I couldn’t respond. People were dying, and I was trying to save them.
Meanwhile, the girls were off to the market.
Pel slapped her hand on the steering wheel. “Why isn’t he picking up?”
Jules half-closed her eyes. “For once, I think Dad deserves some slack. He’s…” her voice trailed off. Taking a deep breath, she looked her mother in the eye. “He’s scared, Mom.” Yesterday’s videophone call with me clung to Jules’ mind the way her brother’s dirty laundry clung to the edge of his hamper. After the call, she’d told her mother what she’d seen of me, and those words, Jules was sure, had played a big role in getting her mother to take the pandemic as seriously as she was. No matter our quarrels, my wife knew that I was never anything less than honest when it came to medical matters, and Jules knew she knew it.
Pel’s pink Pirouette-13 sped cautiously down the streets of our cozy neighborhood. Inside, the scent of pumpkin spice air freshener still clung to the car; Pel had sprayed it not long before they’d left. The morning sun shone bright as it rose, casting lengthening shadows on a picture of suburban desolation. Our Seacrest Heights neighborhood was a shell of its former self; it had dried up and encysted. Many residences showed no signs of activity. Garbage bins sat uncollected on the curb in neat, color-coded rows. Strange, mangy-looking critters rummaged around in the darkness, under eaves or hedges. Dead birds and worse littered the laws. Marshmallow-sized maggots lay on the street, as dead as the roadkill they’d once eaten. Jules could swear she saw something growing from them, though they’d splattered beneath the tires of her mother’s car, and when Jules craned her head back and looked out through the window and over the edge of the hill, she could see cars jammed into Seacrest Avenue, bumper to bumper.
Pretty much everyone was trying to leave.
Once again, Pel tapped the console screen. Her contacts list popped up.
“Who are you calling now?”
The white, caller ID text that appeared as the screen turned black answered Jules’ question for her.
Margaret Revenel.
However bulky Jules’ plastic goggles might have been, they weren’t bulky enough to hide the way her eyebrows rose at the sight of her only living grandmother’s name.
“Mom, I don’t think this is the right time to call grandma.”
“You and your father never think it’s the right time for me to call my mom,” Pel replied.
“Yep.” Jules nodded as if it was the most obvious thing in the world.
Pel’s eyes rolled, even as she stared out through her own goggles at the road ahead. “C’mon Julette, she’s your grandmother, and she’s the only one you’ve got.”
Don’t remind me, Jules thought.
Pel tightened her gloved grip on the steering wheel. “I know you two don’t get along, but… she’s family.”
Jules lowered her gaze, but then shot back up again as the call beeped and went through. As usual, Grandma Margaret started talking the instant she popped into view, and, likewise, Jules tried her best to ignore the conversation.
I had turned down most of the Revenel’s cash-offers because I wanted to be able to prove my manhood to myself and to the world and to my in-laws by showing I could be a successful breadwinner. I didn’t want my in-laws’ wealth to make me look impotent. My daughter, on the other hand, objected to her grandparents’ wealth simply as a matter of principle. Jules liked to say that she bet not even a tenth of a percent of the Revenel’s vast fortune was rightfully or cleanly earned. Her grandmother’s penthouse suite at 1337 Petta Drive was like something out of a designer catalog or a traditional wedding planner’s wet dream. Even the tchotchkes were worth more than most people made in a year.
Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.
But then the topic of the conversation turned to yours truly, and my daughter couldn’t maintain radio silence any longer.
“I’m telling you Pelly,” Margaret said, “it’s his breeding. It’s like I always said, you can take a man out of the Valley, but you can’t take the Valley out of a man.”
“Hey grandma,” Jules said, sneering in derision. “I’m right here, you know,” she said, spiky and sardonic. “I can hear you talking about my Dad.”
“And so you should,” Margaret said, with a nod. “I’m giving you wisdom straight from the horse’s mouth. The least you could do is take them time and pay attention. You have to pay attention to get into one of those fancy-pants colleges you want to attend.”
I don’t know about wisdom, Jules thought, but horse’s mouth is right on the money.
“Anyhow,” Margaret said, shooting daggers at her daughter, “Pelly, you should come back home, away from all the trash.”
Jules blanched, as did her mother.
“Ma,” Pel said, “you really need to see what it’s like out here.” Pel raised her hand and whirled her finger around. “All the major thoroughfares are jammed packed. Everyone’s going loopy.”
“It’s a suburb, Pelly,” Margaret said, with a sneer. “People in the suburbs are always loopy. Suburbs are the spawning grounds for second-hand success.”
Jules frowned. “Grandma, Dad and pretty much every medical professional under the Sun are saying to hunker down and stay put—shelter in place. They say it’s the only way we’re going to have any chance of stopping the—”
—Margaret shook her head, tut-tutting, clicking her tongue like one of the people she paid to train her dogs. “Julie,” she said.
My daughter hated being called Julie.
“You’re supposed to be a smart young thing,” Margaret continued, “and smart young things know well enough not to get caught up with the ramblings of people whose heads aren’t screwed on properly. You should know better than that. You too, Pelly.” The old woman glowered at her daughter.
“Ma,” Pel said, “I know Gen and I don’t quite see eye-to-eye on everything, but… this is different. This is a matter of healthcare. I trust him.”
“Even after what happened to your son?” Margaret asked. She slapped her hand on her chest. Jeweled bracelets clacked on her wrists. “To my grandson? To Rale?”
Fuck you, grandma, Jules thought, silently mouthing the words. Her grandmother wasn’t worthy to speak her first brother’s name.
“Pelly,” Margaret said, shaking her head, jangling her necklaces of sapphires and pearls, “Pelly, Pelly, Pelly, don’t you get it?” She leaned into the screen and smiled. “It’s thought-war.” Margaret shook her head again. “Don’t tell me you’re going to let people like that Rambone harlot on CBN tell you what to do. I didn’t raise my daughter to be a lamb for the slaughter.”
“Excuse me?” Jules snorted, though her F-99 mask muffled the sound.
“Mom,” Pel blinked, “please,” she pursed her lips, “don’t say that.” The words had everything they needed, except for reproach.
Jules couldn’t understand why her mother never mustered up the decency to tell Grandma Margaret off like she deserved.
Margaret’s eyes rolled in her head, much like Pel’s criticism rolled off the old woman’s withering mien. “Just tell your priest Pelly; he should be able to get it out of you,” she said. “And there’s always Reginald.”
Softly, Jules moaned. Her grandmother never failed to sing her private augur’s praises.
“He’s told me you haven’t called him for a personalized Dawnsight in months,” Margaret said.
“I prefer the Avion at our local church,” Pel said.
“Bah!” Margaret waved her hand dismissively, her nail extensions raking through the air. She raised a wiry eyebrow. “Have you at least been watching Henrichy and Friends like I told you?”
“Sometimes, Ma, when Gen isn’t around.” Pel looked at her daughter. “But Jules gets upset when it’s on, and she makes some valid points about John’s politics.”
Jules grinned. “You bet I do!” She nodded vehemently.
Henrichy and Friends was the crown jewel of VOL’s daytime programming. It did for housewives, the elderly, and the infirm, what the network’s prime-time lineup did for the rest of their viewer demographic.
“So, all the time?” Margaret cackled hoarsely.
My wife had bad habits of her own, but she did a better job of hiding them than I ever could. Had I known what she’d been doing, I could have talked to her about it and tried to reason with her, before it was too late.
“Ma…” Again, Pel admonished her mother, and again, she only had half her heart in it. My wife swallowed Margaret’s commandments, even as Pel kept telling herself that she was right-minded enough to sort truth from falsehood, and to know what was spin and was, good old-fashioned egg-headery.
Margaret’s tone turned grim. She glowered. “Pelly… you’re married to an apostate—”
“—Ma, he’s—”
“—No, my darling girl, it doesn’t matter what he says. He can pretend from one end of the earth to the other, but, at the of the day,” Margaret leaned in and whispered, “he’s an Angel-hater.” She locked eyes with my wife. “Pel, your husband’s an apostate and don’t you dare think for even a moment that he wouldn’t abandon every iota of his so-called medical integrity if it gave him an opportunity to hurt the Church and advance the atheistic, globalist agenda his pagan, slant-eyed patrons in Mu have planned for the rest of us.”
Jules didn’t say anything. Her jaw just hung open from behind her transparent face-mask.
“Ma,” Pel said, with a groan, “Gen’s not like the others. He’s different.”
“So you say,” Margaret replied. “You’ve said that since the day you found out he was an apostate heretic.” The old woman harrumphed. “Imagine what your Father would say if he were still here.”
Margaret reached toward the screen and ended the call. The screen cut to black.
Pel dialed my console one last time, and the call rang and rang, the icon jittering on the screen… but I didn’t pick up.
I wish I had.
Jules flattened her brow. “This is why we should just pretend we’re not related to her.”
Letting out a long sigh, Pel turned her head to our daughter. “Jules, how would you feel if I pretended we weren’t related?”
“Well, I wouldn’t be related to Grandma Margaret anymore…” Jules muttered, looking away.
My wife’s eyes blazed. “Julette Radelle Howle,” Pel snapped, “what’s gotten into you?”
Jules crossed her arms and leaned back into her seat, ready to give her mother an earful of what she really thought about her grandmother and the woman’s viewpoints when my daughter suddenly lurched forward in shock as our local Gilman's supermarket came into view.