Chosen

I had until Monday to recover.

Around noon I finally wandered into the kitchen, after taking a shower for so long the hot water began to run out. Good thing we had a separate water heater for the little apartment over the garage where I lived, or I probably would have heard about it from my mother. All right, so I was still living at home, but the apartment gave me at least the illusion of independence, if not the real thing. It also allowed me to pay much lower rent than I would have otherwise. My parents didn’t want to charge me anything — well, not my mother, anyway — but I’d insisted. It was a pittance, but it did cover the utilities and helped give them some extra wiggle room.

My mother had the little white TV on the kitchen counter turned on and was frowning as she watched some cable news talking head going on about a new illness that had begun appearing in New York and Los Angeles the day before. Reports were also coming in from up and down both coasts about this unnamed disease, which left its victims hospitalized with extremely high fevers.

“More Ebola?” I asked, blinking against the too-bright light in the kitchen and making a beeline for the fridge, where my mother always kept a pitcher of iced tea, even in the dead of winter.

“No, Jessica,” she said, that little pucker of worry still showing between her brows. “Something else. They don’t know what it is.”

“Mmm.” At that moment, I was far more concerned with getting some caffeine into my bloodstream ASAP than worrying about the disease du jour. Those sorts of things never seemed to affect us here in Albuquerque. I wouldn’t say we were exactly the city that America forgot, but if it weren’t for Breaking Bad, I doubted most people would have spared my hometown a second thought.

From the side-eye my mother was giving me as I downed the iced tea, I guessed that the makeup I’d carefully applied earlier wasn’t doing much to hide the evidence that I’d had, as they say, a gaudy night. But because I hadn’t been driving and was more or less ambulatory this morning, she seemed to be giving me a pass.

“Dad, have a shift today?” I inquired, after refilling my glass of iced tea and taking a few more gulps. Since I felt fortified enough to eat at that point, I popped the pitcher of tea back into the fridge and got a package of English muffins out of the breadbox.