Devil House(40)

There was a lot of construction lately, or it seemed that way. Old buildings getting renovated. Apartments turning into condominiums, jazzy landscaping out front and ridiculous new names like “Falcon’s Landing.” Derrick had seen these places before all the computer people started putting down roots; he knew what they really were, no matter how anybody tried to dress them up. Still, sometimes, at the right time of day, he sensed a little glamour in the modest boomtown makeover everything was getting. He’d have renamed plenty of places around town, too, given the chance—there was an old building that looked like it must have been a real estate office once but was a church now, and he liked to call it the Ghost Temple, which was a shortening of its actual name: Spirit of Prophecy Church of the Living God.

There were a couple of people standing on the grass in front of it talking to each other today, he saw as he passed. They were dressed in business clothes: a woman in a plain brown skirt and matching jacket over a cherry-red blouse, and a man in a plain grey suit and lavender tie. He was near enough to them to catch some of their conversation as he passed, just enough to know that they were realtors.

“Zoned for retail or rental or really whatever you want,” he heard from one of them, and something about permits from the other, and then they were behind him. They’d been standing in front of the church’s modest, sun-faded marquee, which presently cast a shadow over an even more modest FOR SALE stuck into the grass, WILL BUILD TO SUIT. He’d raised an eyebrow, reading it silently to himself; it paired, in his mind, with Hawley’s news about closing the store.

He tucked it away, continuing homeward. This was grown-up stuff, dull real-world stuff. He was now grown-up enough himself to be interested by it, but still young enough to think of it as somebody else’s affair.

SOUGHT AND HIGHLY FAVORED

But the best thing about the long walk home was that extending it didn’t make it feel less purposeful. Any additional zigs and zags represented an alternate route, not idle distractions. Wandering around is great, but it’s better to have a destination.

This distinction was one of many like it that Derrick had been quietly filing in his memory since childhood. Reckoned together, they didn’t quite amount to a creed. They were more like a list that had taken on mildly dogmatic aspirations: 7 Up over Sprite; short story anthologies over single-author collections, but novels over both; space opera over sword and sorcery; but dystopian future earth movies over both of these and over alternative history science fiction, if only by a little—and all four of these better than epic fantasy, which was sword and sorcery without the swords and with worse sorcerers. Night over day, late afternoon over morning, but morning over dusk, long sleep over naps, midnight over noon. Twilight Zone over Outer Limits. Shields over armor, castles over forts, turrets over towers. By the end of his walk, he sometimes found he’d argued himself out of a position he’d thought immutable at its beginning; there was real pleasure, even joy, in the process.

There were three manila envelopes on the coffee table when he got home. His mother had put them there, trying to make it look casual; the stack had a studied splay to it. But Derrick knew what they were, and that they’d been placed on the table specifically for his eyes. They were college brochures. It was expected that he’d apply to in-state schools first, out of practicality, but his mother knew her son wanted to see more of the world.

She hadn’t had the chance herself. She’d gone straight to nursing school from high school; there’d been a very persuasive recruiter on campus who said an associate’s degree in nursing would travel with you wherever you went. A license that worked like a passport to decent jobs anywhere in the world sounded very appealing to young Diane Coleman; but, during her clinical rotations, she kept hearing that the real money was in overtime pay, which was there for any nurses willing to work it. She remembered this when she landed her first job out of school, and she never looked back.

The overtime crew at any work site is an invisible elite. They settle into their work as if it were part of them, and cash in unused vacation pay not out of greed but out of habit. She’d picked this habit up early, advancing from floor nurse to assistant charge to shift charge over just a few years; once she ran out of promotions to seek, she starting working toward her bachelor’s degree. Marrying Bill (he worked in medical records; their courtship consisted of two years’ worth of lunch breaks), having a child with him: it only slowed her down a little. As private hospitals around the valley closed or consolidated, she learned to land on her feet; new hospitals actively recruited her before they’d even admitted their first patients.

She had worked her entire life, seeing hard work as the price she paid for the things she liked best about herself: her independence, her experience, her authority. Derrick was more like his father, a bookworm who’d found that high-ceilinged rooms full of medical files were peaceful places to read if you got ahead of your work early in the shift. She didn’t begrudge Bill his books; Bill with his books was a joy in her life. The palpable energy of his focus in his chair by the bookcase as he leafed through shiny paperbacks with spaceships on their covers. The pleasure he took in just being there. But she’d tried, without making a show of it, to infect Derrick with some of her ambition. It had served her well.

Derrick picked up the envelope on top of the fanned stack and physically suppressed a laugh. “Where am I going to college now?” he said. His mother was in the next room.