The Accidentals by Minrose Gwin

Author:Minrose Gwin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2019-06-04T16:00:00+00:00

18

June

WHEN DAD BROUGHT GRACE HOME FROM THE AIRPORT in New Orleans, it was past eleven and the Russians were camped out down in Cuba about to blow us all up. I’d been watching TV all night to see when I would need to go to the basement and shield myself against nuclear holocaust. Dad had told me to keep up with the news, he wouldn’t be long, three hours at the most. I pointed out that it wasn’t the most opportune time for my sister to get on an airplane, but he was intent on getting her home, it was all he could talk about. He wanted the three of us to be together again, come what may. He’d even called Frances to see if she wanted to come down to Opelika. She told him he was being silly, life had to go on, people couldn’t be running down to their basements at the drop of a hat.

Dad told her she was a fool and an idiot, whistling Dixie while the world was on the brink of annihilation. For days he had been in a frenzy of preparation, grimly lugging a zillion jugs of water and cases of Beanee Weenees and Chef Boyardee and bunches of carrots down the basement stairs. Carrots? I’d said (carrots were not my favorite vegetable), but he said raw foods were good for you and carrots were good for the eyes, plus they kept indefinitely. The earth would be poisoned by the Bomb, who knew the next time we were going to get anything fresh. He sent me out to our spent garden to dig potatoes. He’d papered the insides of the window frames with aluminum foil and duct tape so that the basement was black as pitch without the one bare lightbulb, which he said would go off once the Bomb was dropped, leaving us in total darkness. He’d stockpiled candles, matches, flashlights, and batteries galore, plus a Geiger counter so he could measure the radiation outside. I pointed out to him the obvious: that if he stepped outside to measure it, the radiation, if there were any, would kill us all. He looked at me and rolled his eyes as if I’d said something very stupid instead of something very smart. He looked out the kitchen window at our garden plot, the former site of his bomb shelter, and sighed with regret.

When the phone call came, I’d gotten sick of looking at the trench between Walter Cronkite’s eyebrows and gone to bed. I’d turned my light out, not because I was sleeping but because I was afraid, and not of the Russians but of my weasel of a sister. I hadn’t heard word one from Grace since she’d sashayed out of the hospital and gone on the lam for eight months. The last time I’d seen her, at our pitiful little Christmas gathering in Frances’s living room, she’d looked through me like I was a piece of air. I’d hoped she would stop

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