The World Is Ending

The trucks started arriving at 7:40 the next morning.

Fourteen of them, lined up on the gravel road with their engines grumbling and their exhaust hanging in the cold. Mara stood on the loading dock in a borrowed pair of work boots, a mug of gas station coffee going cold in her hand, and watched the first pallet of rice come down the ramp.

"Where do you want it, ma'am?" the foreman asked.

"Aisle one. Stack to the third marker. Leave a walkway wide enough for a cart."

"Ma'am, I've been hauling twenty years. Nobody orders this much for a restaurant."

"It isn't a restaurant."

He shrugged and waved the forklift forward.

The warehouse woke up around her. Chains rattled, and pallets thumped onto concrete, and the whole building filled with the warm smell of diesel and cardboard. Dust turned gold in the slanting light from the high windows. Mara watched men carry bags of flour that would feed families in November, and she felt a fierce, quiet love for every one of them, and for the weight in their arms.

By nine, aisle one was half full. Brenner himself had come out in a pickup, clipboard in hand, and walked the floor with his mouth slightly open.

"You're serious," he said. "Fifty thousand pounds of rice."

"I'll want it split between three of the buildings, eventually. Start with this one."

"Eventually."

"There's a second order Friday."

He scratched his chin. "Ma'am, I'll be honest. I've never loaded a truck like this for one person. Somebody out there think the world's ending?"

Mara looked at him for a long moment. His face was open and sunburnt and entirely decent. In the shelters she had met men like him, and most of them had not made it to November.

"Something like that," she said. "Keep a few cases of oil for yourself, Mr. Brenner. Take them home today."

He laughed, then stopped laughing when she did not.

While the foreman argued with a driver about a pallet jack, Mara slipped behind a stack of crates and laid her palm on a case of antibiotics. In. The case vanished. Her head gave a dull throb, and a thin taste of pennies rose on her tongue. She breathed through it and straightened her face.

Nobody had seen. She would lose a hundred pounds of supplies the day a court froze her accounts, and she would not lose these.

A silver car crunched up the gravel at 9:20. A black one followed. Then a third.

Grant got out first. He had not shaved. Lorraine came out of the back seat in dark glasses and a cream suit, and Alan Pruitt unfolded himself from the passenger side with his leather folder under his arm.

Grant stopped at the foot of the dock. He stared past Mara at the open doors. A forklift passed with three pallets of bottled water. A man wheeled a crate of antibiotics down aisle two. Stacked generators gleamed under the work lights.

"What is all this?"

"Supplies."

"For what?" He took a step up. "Are you building a bunker?"

A burst of laughter escaped him, shaky and high.

He turned to his mother. "Mom. Look at this. She's lost her mind."

"I told you," Lorraine said. She was staring at the pallets as if she were counting them. "I told you she was unwell."

"I am fine," Mara said.

"You're stockpiling rice in a freezer." Grant spread his hands. "It's August. What is it you think is coming?"

She said nothing. The forklift hummed past. A second truck backed in, beeping.

"See?" He pointed. "She won't even say. That's what I'm telling you. That's what I'll tell the judge."

"Two diesel generators," Lorraine read from a delivery slip, and her lip curled. "Do you know what those cost, Mara? Do you know what that money could have done for this family?"

"I know exactly what it was meant to do for this family."

Lorraine's mouth shut like a purse.

Pruitt cleared his throat. "Ms. Ellison, my client has filed a motion requesting half of the assets held in the Walter Ellison Trust, as marital property or, in the alternative, as the product of marital efforts. I am also here to request an accounting of every purchase you have made in the past forty-eight hours."

"Request denied," said a dry voice.

Renata Voss walked up the gravel in a navy suit and flat shoes that had clearly seen a construction site before. She took the motion out of Pruitt's hands and read it standing, the corner of her mouth twitching.

"Case number," she said. "I see one. It was assigned at 8:52 this morning. Interesting. At 8:05, I filed a petition for dissolution on behalf of my client." She slid a thick envelope from her briefcase and held it out to Grant. "You're served, Mr. Hollis."

Grant stared at it. "You filed first?"

"She did. Ms. Ellison is the petitioner. Your motion is filed in her case, which means it is a response, and I would be delighted to discuss its merits. Say, in two weeks."

"Two weeks."

"Plenty of time to hear arguments about the trust." Renata's eyes were bright. "Which, as you may recall, was created thirty-one years before you and Ms. Ellison met."

Lorraine had gone very still. Grant took the envelope as if it might burn him. His thumb found the edge and crimped it, and Mara watched the crease form in the paper, small and permanent.

It was the end of the marriage. She felt it land in the air between them, quiet and final. She had expected to feel grief, or triumph. What she felt was lighter than either, like putting down a bag she had carried so long she had forgotten it was not part of her arm. A man she had loved for seven years, standing in the gravel with legal papers in his hands, and nothing she wanted to say.

"You can have the house," she said. "Keep the furniture. I want nothing from it."

"You want..." His mouth opened. "You want nothing? You're rich! You have a fortune!"

"I know."

"Then why..."

"Mr. Hollis." Renata's voice cut him off. "That is the end of the conversation."

"She's hiding something." Lorraine pulled off her sunglasses. Her eyes were hard and bright, and they never left the pallets. "Nobody buys this much for nothing. Grant, she knows something.

Find out what."

"Mom."

"I mean it."

A man jogged down the loading ramp. Brenner's accounts clerk, a young man in a pressed shirt, his phone in one hand and a receipt in the other.

He stopped in front of Mara, out of breath.

"Ms. Ellison? I'm sorry. The last three orders did not clear."

"Which three?"

"The generators. The medical lot. The diesel." He swallowed. "The bank rejected the wire. It says the account is on hold."

The gravel was very quiet.

Renata's phone had begun to ring in her hand.

She looked at the screen, and her face changed.

"The clerk signed it early," she said softly. "The judge granted the hold ahead of schedule.

Everything is frozen. All accounts. Trust and personal."

Somebody laughed. It was low and delighted, and it came from Grant. He lifted his chin, and for the first time that morning, a real smile spread across his face.

"I told you," he said. "You'll be crawling back by the end of the week."

"Grant," Renata said, without turning her head, "if you say one more word to my client, I will ask the judge to read your texts aloud."

"What texts?"

"The ones to Ms. Pierce."

His smile faltered. He shoved his hands into his pockets and looked at the gravel.

Renata bent close to Mara's ear. "I am sorry. I promised you three days. The clerk was faster than I was. I can have the hold lifted in two weeks, perhaps ten days if the judge likes me."

"I don't have ten days," Mara whispered. "I have sixty. And I need to be done buying before the rains."

Renata drew back and studied her for a second, as a doctor studies an X-ray that does not match the chart. She did not ask what the rains were.

Brenner's clerk was hovering. Behind him, forklifts idled with half-unloaded pallets in the air. Four trucks waited at the gate, engines running. Two hundred thousand dollars in goods stood on the concrete, unpaid.

Mara looked at Grant's smile. Then at the clerk, and the idling forklifts, and the long rows of things that stood between a city and the water.

She had five hundred thousand dollars she could not touch. She had a warehouse full of supplies she had not paid for.

And a bracelet on her wrist, glowing, that no judge in the world could freeze.