Rolling Thunder (46 page)

Besides, now I had Jubal.

Was “Jazzie’s Return” really that good? I didn’t know. I liked it, and it seemed to have something new to say in this still-rather-mysterious (to me, anyway) new genre of Pod music. But I also realized that my celebrity had reached such heights after the Earth tour that I could have recorded “Ninety-nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall” on a Jews’ harp and it would have shot to the top, too. That happens, and an artist should be aware of it. I woke up to it when I realized I was getting the same huge amount of applause on nights when I was clicking like a Geiger counter as on nights when I was about as sharp as the butt end of a bassoon.

The audience begins to adore you for your reputation, as much as anything. You can do no wrong. My best career move at this point would be to die. Then every snippet I’d ever recorded, outtakes, bootlegs, do-overs, could be marketed as “The Lost Podkayne Sessions.”

What an artist needs most at this point in her career is somebody honest enough to tell her when she stinks.

Anyway, because of that, when Travis issued his invitation a few days after coming back to the Fortress of Sillitude (sorry, Solitude), it was for the “family” to come to him rather than us going back to town.

Travis has two families, and they had always been more or less separate. That’s because his biological family, the Broussard clan, were mostly on Earth, and his adoptive family, the Stricklands, Garcias, and Redmonds, were all on Mars. But that changed after Grumpy, and most of the Broussards were now either Martian citizens or residents. Only a few diehards were still holding out Earthside.

Everybody got an invitation, and it took two buses to bring them all out to the Fortress. It was chaos for a while there, with me being introduced to dozens of Broussards I’d never met before, since practically all of them had arrived on Mars while I was sleeping on Europa. Jubal was in heaven. Though he doesn’t do well in crowds, this crowd consisted of practically all the people in the universe that he cared about. He and I had spent the whole day cooking a massive smorgasbord, or as Jubal put it, “He’p yourself style.” Now he had become quite the social butterfly, and half his conversations were in bayou French, which I gathered he was a lot better at than at English. I resolved to learn it as quickly as possible.

My parents were there, and both sets of grandparents, and Uncle Bill and Aunt Amelia and some of their brood, and Mike and Marlee (still together, my fingers crossed), and Tina and Quinn. Somebody had brought a guitar and somebody else had brought a squeeze box, and I tried my hand at the washtub bass, and soon there was stompin’ and dancin’ and feastin’ fit to beat the Mardi Gras.
Laissez les bons temps rouler!

After about an hour Grandma Kelly took me by the arm, gently, and without a word led me down the hall to my bedroom and closed the door behind us. Mom was there, looking worried. She faced me and put her hands on my shoulders.

“I’m not going to be judgmental, baby,” she said. “But please tell me. What’s going on with you and Jubal?”

Well, it was a lot better than “Are you fucking him?”

“Is it that obvious?”

“It might have taken me a bit longer if I only had you to look at, but not a lot longer.”

“The way Jubal looks at you …” Grandma Kelly sighed. “The man always was a bit of a puppy dog. If he was a basset hound, he’d be tripping over his own ears.”

“So what have you done, Poddy?” Mom asked.

“I’ve fallen in love with him, Mom.”

They both looked at me like I was maybe a piece of furniture they were thinking about buying, both of them leaning toward no.

“Have you thought this over?” Mom asked.

“How much thinking can you do when you’re in love, Mom?”

“There’s that,” she said, with a sigh.

“The serious answer is, yes, I have. I know it’s not going to be easy. And you probably think I’m stupid, him being so much older …” I didn’t know where to go from there.

“Not stupid. You’ve never been stupid, Poddy. In fact, sometimes I’ve wondered if you were being too analytical for your own good. Some of those boys in high school were … never mind that. Kelly?”

Grandma Kelly moved into position. What was this, good cop, bad cop?

“Does Travis know about this? He does? What did he say?”

“He was against it. I had to slap him around.”

Grandma didn’t smile back at me.

“Was?”

“Then he talked to Jubal.” That seemed to stop her for a moment. “He doesn’t own Jubal, Grandma. And Jubal stood up to him, for once.”

They looked at each other, and Grandma gestured to Mom, like “She’s your daughter, you’ve got the floor. “

Mom was silent for a while, then nodded.

“It’s not just the age, Poddy. It’s almost like he’s a relative. Hush! I know he’s not, by blood anyway. He’s an old friend of the family.” Did she step a little hard on the word
old
?

“But he’s only a little older than you now, Mom. And he’s younger than Grandma. I mean, when they met, he was older, but now he’s …” Something was tickling at my brain.
Ah, but I was so much older then …

“What Evangeline is saying,” Grandma put in, “is that … well, we all know he wouldn’t hurt you. He’s not capable of it. He’s the sweetest man I have ever known. I admit, I never thought of him as lover material …” She shook her head. “What I’m saying, if
you
hurt
him,
I will slap you
so
hard …”

“You’ll have to get in line, Kelly,” Mom said.

“I’d never hurt him,” I swore. “And his sweetness is one of the reasons I fell in love with him.”

“Well, all right, then.” Mom hugged me, and Grandma got into the act, and it was another of those three-way lovefests. I’ll admit, it didn’t touch me as deeply as with Jubal and Travis, my eyes remained dry—I mean, where did they get off, giving me the third degree?—but I knew it was because they loved me, and loved Jubal, and didn’t want either of us to get hurt.

But still. Nosy. I hope I never get that way … but I probably will. The nosy gene was all around me.

Grandma pulled back a little and looked at me, narrow-eyed.

” ‘One of the reasons’?” she asked. “Tell me more, just between us girls.”

I mimed zipping my lips. “Personal, Grandma. I’ll never tell.” She shrugged, and started to turn away. “But he
is
hung like a stallion, and fucks like a bunny rabbit.”

Two seconds of shocked silence—gotcha!—and then we all three started laughing so loud that Dad knocked on the door and stuck his head in for a second. He took in the scene and wisely decided it was none of his business.

“MY REASON FOR
bringing y’all out here—and I
do
have one, other than drinking …”

You’d never know it to look at us. We are not, by and large, a hard-drinking family, though the various Broussards were demonstrating both a larger capacity and a better ability to hold it than the rest of us.

Jubal never has more than one beer, and Travis, an alcoholic, drinks coffee or ginger ale. But a lot of people were feeling no pain.

“What I’m offering is a Mystery Tour. Any of you who are interested can board my ship, the
Second Amendment,
in one week’s time—to get your affairs in order—and take off on a ten-day, all-expenses-paid junket to a mystery destination that I guarantee you’ll find interesting.”

“Getting your affairs in order sounds ominous, Travis,” one of the Broussards said. They knew him as well as the rest of us did. There was general laughter. Travis held up his hands, palms out.

“I guarantee this is safe as a trip to the store. What I meant, you may need to line things up so you can get time off from your jobs.”

“So what are we going to see?” somebody asked.

“That’s why it’s called a Mystery Tour.”

There were more questions, a lot of them, but Travis wouldn’t be budged. I caught Grandma Kelly’s eye, and she leaned over and whispered in my ear.

“Same old Travis. He loves to be in control, and he loves surprises.”

“Do you have any idea what he’s up to?”

“Not a clue. How about Jubal? He know anything?”

“Well, if Travis told him something in confidence, he wouldn’t tell anyone, not even me. But I don’t think he knows.” Which wouldn’t stop me from grilling him about it, tonight, in bed. We ladies have our methods.

When the party broke up I didn’t have any sense of who would be going and who wouldn’t. Some were obviously interested, and some were dubious, and a few just couldn’t get away. I approached Jubal as he was kissing a cousin good-bye.

“Will you go with me,
cher
?” he asked.

“Whither thou goest,” I told him, secretly relieved that I wouldn’t have to cajole him into it. Jubal hates travel, but I wouldn’t have missed this for anything.

A WEEK LATER,
most of the people who had been at the party boarded the
Second Amendment.
It was a huge ship; everybody got a private cabin. We cruised for four days, accelerating for half, turning around and decelerating for half. Mars quickly got smaller, but the best clue was that the sun got smaller, too. That meant we weren’t going to Earth. And the turnaround time meant we weren’t going to Jupiter.

That left the asteroid belt, and there were way too many of those for me to estimate which one might be our destination.

We never lacked for things to do, and we ate like kings, dining on stuff most of us had seldom had since the crisis began, all taken from a bubble pantry like the one in the Fortress.

But basically, not a lot happens on an ocean voyage or a space voyage. We had poker tournaments and I lost a few bucks. We worked out. Kelly appointed herself cruise director and organized lots of fun stuff to keep us all occupied.

The rest of my biological family had a little time to adjust to me and Jubal as an established fact. Dad was the hardest sell, but the more he observed us, the easier he got with the idea. Granddaddy Manny was fine with it from the beginning.

Mike was suspicious as hell. Jubal was a legend to him, like to so many other people, and he went around frowning at the thought of his big sister—his former big sister, now that he was as old as I was— involved with this geezer. Then one day he came up and apologized for being a jerk. It was a little like he was reading prepared lines, and later Marlee confided to me that she’d had to “slap him around a little.” Figuratively, of course. After that, he and Jubal hit it off famously.

There was really only one thing of note that happened on the trip out. One night, as we were getting ready for bed, Jubal suddenly dropped to one knee and took my hand. He seemed upset, and I couldn’t imagine what the problem was.

He stuttered around it for a moment, then inadvertently slipped into French. He stopped himself and finally managed to choke it out.

“Podkayne, will you marry me?”

I had to work very hard to stifle a laugh, which would have been one of sheer relief, because I knew it could be misinterpreted.

I looked at him down there, looking desperately up at me, and then I got down on my knees and took both his hands.

“I love you, Jubal. Of course I’ll marry you.”

Once more, there was the rib thing as he hugged me and kissed me. I’d have to train him to be more careful, but just then I didn’t mind at all. What’s a cracked rib or two at a moment like that?

Then Jubal leaped to his feet and went to the bedroom door, flinging it open. Travis was standing there, looking almost as nervous as Jubal, which meant he hadn’t been eavesdropping.

“She say yes!” he shouted. Jeez, Jubal, wake up the whole ship, why don’t you?

And about an hour later I was walking down the aisle …

TRUTH: I HAD
never imagined a ceremony. When it happened, I’d assumed we’d hop a train down to City Hall and fill out a civil contract. Jubal had confessed he wasn’t religious, and I sure wasn’t, and I wasn’t one of those girls who’d dreamed about a big wedding and designed her gown when she was eight.

But Jubal wanted a ceremony, and I had no objections.

Travis had had a week to set it up, “Just in case you said yes,” he later told me. Nobody else knew except Mom, who had to be in on it because she provided the wedding dress, which had been hers when she married Dad. A few alterations, and it fit me like a glove. It was white, and floor-length. I couldn’t believe what I saw when I looked in the mirror.
Why, Poddy, you’re glowing!

Travis must have bought some sort of wedding-in-a-box, because he had everything. There was no “aisle” on the
Second Amendment,
so he brought along some church pews and cleared out the biggest room and set them up to make one. There were tons of flowers all around the room. Later, there was a simply monstrous cake. There was the “Bridal Chorus” from Wagner’s
Lohengrin
. I wouldn’t have been surprised if Travis had popped a flower girl out of one of his bubbles to strew rose petals in my path.

Jubal was resplendent in a black-and-white tux. Granddaddy Manny was his best man because Travis, in his capacity as captain, had to perform the service. Admiral Bill was in full-dress uniform. I had Broussard bridesmaids whose names I couldn’t even remember. Grandma Kelly was Matron of Honor. I had a corsage to toss.

Dad walked me down the aisle to where Jubal was standing … on a box! I almost burst out giggling, but by a supreme effort of will maintained my dignity. In place of an altar there was a table draped in the Martian flag, so it was clear this was a civil ceremony. Jubal had written the vows himself, with help from Travis and others, and mercifully they hadn’t put together one of those awful, sappy, breathless, embarrassing ego trips I’d seen at other secular weddings. Basically they’d just taken the traditional vows and stripped out the religious stuff. If Travis had asked me to “love, honor, and obey” I had brought a (borrowed) pencil to rewrite the contract, but it was “love, honor, and cherish.” Nobody’s going to obey in my marriage; we’ll talk things out like civilized people, and then I’ll get Jubal to do what I want him to do.