Chapter 8

Chapter 8

Milo

"Generator's the last one on the floor," the man at Hadley's Hardware said, slapping the top of the crate. "Had a fella in this morning wanted it for his hunting cabin, but he balked at the price. You sure you don't want to think it over?"

"I'm sure."

He rang it up with eight red fuel cans, two chainsaws, a box of hand tools, a hundred feet of heavy chain, rolls of plastic sheeting and every bag of rock salt he had in the back. I watched the total climb on the little green screen and did the math in my head. When I left the bank yesterday, I had felt rich for the first time in my life. Now, after Mayfield Wholesale, Pell's Pharmacy, Rhett's order and the parkas at the mall, I had a little under twenty-six thousand dollars left, and the fifty-thousand-dollar bonus wouldn't come until Monday, if it came at all.

I signed the slip anyway. You can't eat money in the second year of a freeze. I had seen a man on Mercer Street burn a stack of twenty-dollar bills to warm his hands for half a minute.

From Hadley's, I drove to the farm supply store on the county road and bought seed. Barley, winter wheat, kale, cabbage, potatoes, beans, onions, carrots, anything that might grow under lights in the greenhouses at Northfield. The woman at the counter asked if I was starting a farm in November, and I said yes, and she laughed as if I had told a joke.

The last stop was Mayfield Wholesale again. I needed more oil, more salt, flour, yeast, and as much canned meat as the shelves still held. The store was busier than yesterday. The radio warning had done that much. People were buying bottled water and batteries, but they were also buying chips and soda and frozen pizza, and most of them were laughing about it, the way people laugh when they are a little scared and don't want anyone to know.

Darlene was working the same register. She recognized me before I reached her.

"Restaurant boy," she said. "You came back."

"I forgot a few things."

She scanned my cans without looking at them. When the man behind me in line stepped away to grab a pack of gum, she leaned over the counter and lowered her voice.

"What you said yesterday," she said. "About the cold. You meant that, didn't you?"

"Yes."

"How bad?"

I thought about lying to her, about saying something easy so she could go home tonight and sleep. Then I thought about the woman on Mercer Street who sold her coat for a bag of rice.

"Worse than anyone is saying on the radio," I said. "It won't go away in a week, and it won't go away by spring. If you have family, get them somewhere with a heat source that doesn't need the power grid. Buy food that doesn't spoil. Do it this week."

She looked at me over her reading glasses for a long moment. Her hands had stopped moving on the scanner.

"I've got my two grandsons with me," she said quietly. "Their mother passed last year. They're nine and eleven."

"Then buy for three, and buy for a long time."

She nodded once and finished ringing me up. When she handed me the receipt, she held onto it a second.

"If it gets as bad as you say," she said, "where will you be?"

"Northfield. The university's field station, forty miles north."

She folded the receipt and pushed it into my hand, and I didn't know yet whether I had just done something kind or something very dangerous.

I drove around to the back of the empty Sears again. The lot was deserted, and the wind was moving bits of trash in slow circles under the dead lights. I touched my grandmother's ring, and everything in my back seat went into the gray room the way it had yesterday. The generator. The fuel. The seed. The chainsaws. When I closed my eyes, I could see all of it sitting in neat rows next to the rice and beans and charcoal, and beyond them the gray floor stretched on as far as I could see.

It should have been full by now. I had put enough in there to fill a garage.

I sat in the car and turned the ring slowly on my finger. My grandmother had worn it every day I knew her. She never once took it off, not to wash dishes, not to garden. When she gave it to me on her porch in Millbrook, she had closed my fingers over it and said something I hadn't understood. She said it would keep what I put in it, and that I should never let anyone take it from me, because it would only ever answer to her family.

I had thought she meant it as a keepsake. I had been fifteen.

The sun was going down by the time I pulled into the gravel lot of Gallagher Outfitters. The sign on the door was turned to closed, and the big warehouse was dark, but a light was on in a small window at the back. I parked beside the red truck and sat there for a minute with the engine off, listening to the wind push against my car.

I didn't know why I was nervous. He was a man I had known for a day and a half. He had shown me a notebook and told me my name was in it, and that should have been the only thing I was thinking about.

It wasn't.

He opened the back door before I could knock. He had changed into a dark blue flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and his hair was damp, as if he had just washed his face.

"You came," he said.

"You asked me to."

"I know. I just figured you'd think about it on the drive and decide I was crazy." He stepped back to let me in. "Watch your head on the beam."