Free Carry the One by Carol Anshaw Page B

lovable.”
    From Nick, she knew that the bigness started very, very, very small. But extremely compressed. In the moments before the bang happened, the whole universe was the size of a dime. And Nick didn’t really let you say “happened”; there wasn’t any space or time for it to happen in. Back then—although he didn’t let you say “then” either—space-time and matter and energy were all just rolled into something incredibly dense and hot.
    Carmen had to flex her mind to accommodate stuff like this. Astronomy was not her strong suit. It took Nick three demonstrations with a tilted apple Earth circling a peach Sun to get her to understand the seasons.
    “Probably lots happening on the alien front.” Space aliens and astrology were his least favorite subjects. Really, he didn’t even consider them subjects.
    So he didn’t say anything.
    So she didn’t say anything either.
    Finally he said, “If they come for a visit, it probably won’t be with friendly intentions. And they won’t be little green men. The distances are too great for any sort of humanoid creatures to make it all the way here. Even traveling at the speed of light—and you know what’s faster than the speed of light?”
    “Something,” she guessed.
    “Nothing. To get here they will have to be more advanced than us. Which probably means they’ll have evolved into artificial intelligence.” He stopped and looked at Carmen with well-founded suspicion.
    “But I just read somewhere another farm wife said she was taken onboard a saucer by very smooth creatures with short horns. And, of course, she was measured and anally probed.”
    “It would take so long for images of Earth to reach those green guys that they’d be watching dinosaurs. Based on their information, when they came for a visit, they’d bring very large anal probes. Which would be useless on us.”
    “You’re so much fun,” Carmen said.
    He pulled her toward him to kiss her hair at the temple. Aside from his irresponsibility, he was a very sweet person. You just couldn’t count on him for anything. Anything. Nor could you believe anything he said about himself or his life. Ultimately, this made him a tiresome person to talk with. Carmen had scaled back her expectations. She was just thankful that he was sitting next to her on this sofa, to all appearances sober. Before Olivia came out of prison and he straightened up to get her back, there was a scary stretch. Detox, then rehab, then retox, then back through the cycle again. Two days after they put him on a plane to a boot camp rehab in Minnesota, the baggage claim in Minneapolis called to say he had never picked up his suitcase. He hadn’t been able to make it past a bar in the Twin Cities airport. Then a month later, on his way out, back at the airport, he got snagged by the same bar.
    “Airports are hard for him” was Alice’s analysis.
    “Right,” Carmen said, “Airports are the problem.”
    Olivia came through the door in a pea coat and a Mongolian hat with earflaps. She looked great in a flinty, soviet way. Whatever blandness there was to her before, prison had cut away. Horace seemed to be giving her a big welcome, putting an arm around her shoulder. Out of her presence and Nick’s, he referred to her as Butch. As she disappearedinto the back of the apartment to get rid of her jacket, Horace glanced in Nick and Carmen’s direction. He bowed like a butler, then lumbered across the room toward them. Nick started humming the theme from Jaws . Horace still projected a hearty image, although some of his former, evenly distributed bulk had slipped off his shoulders to form a gut that hung over his belt. His craggy features had lumped up a little. Carmen hadn’t figured on this, that age would make him more sympathetic. As he approached them, he opened his arms in a giant air hug.
    “Glad you could make it,” he said, then to Nick, “I just ran into your lovely bride at the door.” There was something off