Tales of the Derry Plague , Anselmo, Ray [fun to read txt] 📗

was the only time she ever saw Dad shut Mom’s act down. Mom went off like a pager about how Berkeley was a pit of iniquity and she would NEVer let her daughter attend that place of FILTH and why couldn’t she be a GOOD daughter who stayed home and went to State and married a good man and had babies and didn’t cause her so much GRIEF all the time –

“Samantha!”

Dad snapped that word out, and she might as well have hit Mom with a clawhammer. Kelly thought she might keel over on the spot.

“Samantha,” Dad had repeated, more softly but with an undertone of absolute law, “our daughter just got accepted with a full scholarship to study at one of the five best schools in the country. Any parent would be proud of her, and I know she will excel there and make something of herself. If you can’t rejoice with her over this extraordinary achievement, then she’s not the one with the problem. Now apologize to Kelly, or I will be very angry.”

It took Mom a full minute to spit out “I’m sorry.” Then she stormed off to some other part of the house.

Dad frowned toward where she departed, then turned back to Kelly. “Your mother loves you.”

Kelly remembered biting back the words she’s got a funny way of showing it. “I know. I guess.”

Dad nodded. “It can be hard to tell sometimes. But she does, and she wants you to have a good life. She just … she thinks there’s only one way of doing that, the way she was taught to. You and I, we know it’s not quite that simple.”

“You’re, um … you’re not worried I’ll go to Berkeley and become an atheistic Communist dyke?”

Dad snorted. “Not really. But let me tell you a few things. Any faith that can get destroyed by truth isn’t a faith worth having. Same with political opinions or anything else in your head or heart. I trust God can keep you just as well in California as he can here. And you know what else?”

“What, Dad?”

“If you come back from Cal and tell me you’re not going to church anymore and you’re working to overthrow the government and this is your life partner Daquishawanda and check out your new back tattoo and whatever else … you will still be my daughter and I will still love you. Always.” And James Davis Sweeney opened his huge construction foreman’s arms. And she’d fallen into them and wept in relief.

She wept now, just thinking about it. Mom had never accepted Kelly’s decision, on that and so many other things. To Samantha Sweeney, she was always the rebel, the person who refused to conform. That she tried to conform to her mom’s worldview and couldn’t … Mom could never see it. Mom was incapable of seeing it.

And Dad had been right. At Berkeley she’d kept her faith, though strongly amended and reshaped. She’d learned about the world as it was, and how to improve it. She’d graduated with a B.A. in business administration and got sniffs from some MBA programs, but decided it would be just too stressful for her and took a job in the logistics department of Raley’s, a Sacramento-area supermarket chain. She never dated another woman despite being asked a couple of times, and never found a man she wanted to have kids with.

Most important for her long-term health, in her sophomore year she filled out a questionnaire produced by Cal’s University Health Services and, floored by the results, made an appointment with a counselor. Bipolar II disorder was the final diagnosis, a fairly mild version of it. She got counseling, and she got medications, and she got a dropped jaw from a junior year Psych professor who was amazed she’d done so well for so long without being diagnosed. She’d told that professor, “Well, what choice did I have?”

Same then as now, she thought with a laugh. The world might have come to an end. She might be the only person still kicking. She was certainly the only one still kicking in Sayler Beach. She might have to teach herself a great many things about surviving in a post-plague world, and she might fail more than she succeeded. She’d just lived through a whirlwind eleven, now twelve days like none she’d ever experienced. And now she was having to walk hours just to resupply on the medications that would help her keep doing all that and more.

Really, though, what choice did she have? And it was amazing what you could do when you didn’t really have another choice in the matter besides “curl up and die.” She had no interest in curling up and dying, or she would’ve done it long ago. Nope, not gonna happen. God was in his Heaven and all was wrong with the world, and she was going to keep right on going until she couldn’t. And then … well, maybe she’d keep on going anyway. Just to be a pain.

Kelly sighed. She hoped – and silently prayed, since she didn’t have the words – that Dad and Brad and Brad’s wife Primrose and their children and yes … yes, even Mom was all right. There was no way she could help them right now. God would have to do it for her.

She pulled a water bottle from her pack, drained half of it and kept walking down the highway.

12

DRUGS

Mercifully, the McDonald’s truck was the only vehicle that size to block the route, so Kelly had an easier time the rest of the way. There were five more accidents, most of them one-car crashes, before she reached the little Tamalpais Valley and the remnants of civilization, and she did her best to keep eyes front and not look too closely at the insides of the vehicles. Given the long walk, she didn’t have