Picked a hell of a day to finish movin' in, Rhea Delacroix thought as the workmen tromped past with her bed and manhauled it into her bedroom. San Francisco, normally mild this time of year, was hot, and she longed to shut the door, turn on the environmental controls, and fix herself a glass to sweet tea before she turned her attention to the myriad problems the movers would leave her with once they collected their final payment and shuffled out the door.
Like how to get their scuff marks out of my damn floor, she thought peevishly. Or how I'm going to hang blinds from ass-level. Maybe I should've gotten the polarized windows. God knows I've dropped a fortune on this place as it is. A few thousand more wouldn't've made much difference.
Well, it was too late to rue sins uncommitted, as her aunt Eugenie always said. She'd just have to bribe Moira and a few of the folks from the Level Horizons rec center to help her with the odds and ends, put on a pot of pasta or maybe see if she could find some crawdads worth a damn with to put on a proper boil.
You might as well look for a rubber in a nun's dresser, her aunt sniffed dismissively. The only good mudbug is one pulled from Louisiana mud, sugar.
She could hardly argue the point. The few crawdads she'd tried since she'd set foot here in this city by the bay had tasted like ass and wishful thinking, and langostinos, while tasty in their own right, were a poor substitute for the nuggets of home she slurped from the properly-seasoned head of a mudbug plucked from the sucking bayou mud. Like as not, she'd settle for lobster rolls and some shrimp etoufe and send the leftovers home with her ragtag crew. If she were lucky, they'd leave her enough for lunch the next day; if not, she'd just have to lump it in the campus cafeteria and choke down an alfalfa-sprout sandwich on multigrain bread and curse the day she'd picked up stakes and flown to the other side of the country in pursuit of a dream.
Ain't nothin' keepin' you here, honey, her aunt said briskly, and the blade of her favorite paring knife flicked into view behind an apple that was rapidly disappearing into a bowl. You could always come on home. There's not a university in the country that wouldn't snap you up so fast your bloomers'd bell, and you could get one of them houses down in Beauregard Town or Old Jefferson.
She snorted. There was no way those old tightasses would let her renovate one of those antebellum houses and besmirch its timeless elegance with the rubber kiss of her wheels on the hardwood floors and the gaudy unsightliness of ramps in the doorways and stairlifts bolted to the sinuous balustrade of a spiral staircase, a tumor erupting from cancerous bone. The howls of the historical society would be heard from Nachitoches to New Orleans, and even if they could be overridden, the local grandees and self-appointed preservers of the city's colorful and dignified character would hound her until she either broke or went broke trying to stand her ground. There were causes for which she was willing to spend her energy and her fortune, but the right to shit on a pot in Beauregard Town wasn't one of them.
Well, there's Old Jefferson, her aunt cajoled. You could get a perfectly fine house there, and nobody would say a word about it. Or maybe in the Garden District, where your Daddy lives. He would so love to see you home. We all would, sugar.
She loved her father, but it would be a cold day in hell before she would tuck tail and run home like a whipped dog. She had worked too hard for too long to make a life for herself and stand on her own feet, as unsteady as they might be. She'd gone to Stanford on a full ride and graduated magna cum laude with a degree in cryptolinguistics in three years, and she'd done it while dragging herself through a grueling regimen of PT five days a week, wrestling her shuddering, twitching unruly body for the right to determine her own course. Sometimes after a session, she'd hurt so badly and so completely that she'd simply throbbed from head to toe. On the bad nights, she'd cried herself sick, tears and snot dripping onto her tablet while she lowed and snuffled like a fly-struck heifer. More than once, she'd considered drinking herself blind to dull the ravening fire in her bones and sinews, but that would've meant lurching into agonized motion and mustering the energy to drive to the liquor store, and so she'd just lain on the bed in her dorm room instead, sides heaving as she studied the ins and outs of morphological constructs through the prismatic sheen of tears. She'd beaten her misbegotten body into compliance through sheer force of will, and if her kinfolk happened to call while she was being devoured by the crucible's pitiless fire, well, she just dried up and told them the rasp in her voice was from newly-acquired allergies.
Not surprised, Aunt Eugenie had huffed darkly. The whole damn place is a cesspit if you ask me. A sinkhole of all the trash the rest of the country doesn't want. Christ sakes, Rhea, honey, they had to build a wall just to keep the filth out. How long before it eats its way over and under and turns the whole sorry place into a toxic nightmare? An air filtration system had arrived in her campus mailbox three days later, along with a box of surgical masks with charcoal filters and a handwritten note filled with dire implications against lingering too long in the devil's land.
Not even the devil had stopped Aunt Eugenie from coming to her graduation. She'd turned up with all the rest of her people, resplendent and conspicuous in her eggplant dress and wide-brimmed white hat, and she'd sat there just as neat as you please and dared anyone to give her the business about it, handbag clutched in thin-fingered, blue-veined hands like a shield.
"You did it, honey," she'd crowed when Rhea had found them at commencement's end with her tassel turned to the right and her holographic diploma plate in one trembling hand. She'd smelled of menthol and talc and the same honeysuckle perfume she'd worn for forty years. Papery lips had pressed a warm, dry kiss to her cheek. "Now you can come on home and put this godforsaken place out of mind."
She'd planned on doing just that, had planned on packing up and kicking the dust from her heels and settling on familiar soil, but jobs in her chosen field had been thin on the ground in Louisiana, where the summer humidity could smother a man where he stood and the Mississippi caressed her banks like a devoted but dangerous lover. There was the military, of course, but they had little use for a green young girl whose errant finger might hit the wrong keystroke and send the world to oblivion in a vapor cloud of misguided equal-opportunity employment.
So the devil had kept his prize, and Aunt Eugenie had left her with a kiss and a rosary and another air-filtration system. There had been internships at Macrotech and Imanodyne and Cybertrex Security. A Masters and PhD from Stanford in cryptolinguistics and another B.S. in Advanced Mathematics. Life in a series of drab, minimally accessible apartments where she'd listened to her neighbors fight and fart and fuck. Two years had become three and then five, and eleven years on, here she sat, swapping her on-campus faculty apartment at UCSF for a condo on Sequoia Boulevard. It had seemed like a fine idea at the time, with promise of privacy and more space for her collection of antique books and a respite from the eternal, muddy thump and bleary thrum of car radios down on the quad and the drunken bleating of frat boys who'd mistaken her room for the home of a boon companion.
Now, however, with a crick sullen and simmering at the base of her spine and the promise of sweat prickling on her skin, she was reassessing that decision. For all their myriad flaws, at least the frat boys hadn't clomped through her rooms and peered at her adaptive equipment as though it were alien technology.
"Where you want I should put this?" asked a workman from the kitchen. He held up the convection elements of her modular stovetop as though it were a twentieth-century laptop and not six thousand dollars' worth of custom engineering.
"Down, please," she answered, and fought to suppress a spasmodic twitch. Her meds, usually excellent at controlling her intention tremors and the vagaries of her miswired nervous system, were no match for the adrenaline and cortisol coursing through her system. "On the counter there, gently, if you would. If that broke, I'd be like to lose my mind."
A soft snort. "I heard that." He set the unit down, and she allowed herself an easy breath. At least until there was a jangling clatter from the living room.
She spun her chair on its axis and glided in to investigate. "What's going on in here?" she demanded, fingers curled around the smooth, translucent handrims affixed to her rear wheels.
"Oh, nothing," another workman assured her. "Those just fell over." He stepped over a jumble of handrails, extenders, reachers, and crutches that had been painstakingly arranged against the opposite wall in the not too distant past.
"All of them?" she asked dubiously.
That earned her a desultory shrug. "It's no problem," he send, and bent to pick them up. He gathered a few and tossed them against the baseboard with a clatter.
I'd be better off setting a pack of howler monkeys loose in here, she thought peevishly, but what she said was, "No need. I'm very particular about how I like my things, and I'm sure you've got plenty to do."
He straightened and offered her an indulgent smile, as though she were a precocious child playing lady of the house.
If I were any closer, he'd pat me on the head. "Much obliged."
"Hey, sure thing," he replied, a benevolent lord bestowing a mighty boon, and she was seized with the impulse to give him a heartfelt finger, but her hand was clamped around her handrim like a throttling vise, impotent in the face of another bout of tremors, and she could only suck the inside of her cheek between her teeth and incline her head in acknowledgment. Her right shoulder juddered ominously.
"Sure thing," he repeated, and swaggered off, and one thick-soled workboot nearly came down on the handgrip of a forearm crutch.
She swallowed a moan of helpless despair, and the beginnings of a headache stirred behind her eyes. There was a thud from the master bedroom.
At least the guy putting the recessed doors in knows what he's doing, she thought morosely, and trudged off to survey the latest round of damage.
