“Nope.”
It was the way it was in those days.
Lenore’s mother had been sent to Florida and she was still there, undergoing plastic surgery. But Lenore’s father had vanished.
Weeks had passed, months, and now two years and a half—with no word. The bureau set up by the Federal Government to trace people hadn’t located him. Or any sign of him. Netta knew only that he’d been in the cellar when the Bomb burst. After that, he walked into the silences. He was one of the anonymous dead. Or one of the unidentified mad. Or one of the unfound bodies. Or someone who had a new name and a new life somewhere else—because he’d come to unable to remember, ever again, who he was, where he lived, what his name had been—or because he had wanted to forget.
Nora came home on her bike.
Since he had been thinking about the already-remote “Aftertime,” Ted saw Nora in a new light. She was fourteen now and trying to behave like eighteen. Occasionally, for minutes at a time, the effort was fairly convincing. She’d changed in two years and half. She was hardly a kid now. There was something very precise and well-cut about her profile which (wonder of wonders, he thought) had an almost sweet look. Her nose didn’t turn up so much. Her hair, light like his, was not lank like his any more; it was wavy, like their mother’s. And her clear blue eyes were getting slanty—exactly, he thought, as Nora would prefer it: slanty-eyed women got the dangerous men, she claimed.
At this instant, however, she behaved on the kid side. “Mom!” she yelled through the kitchen screen, “Mr. Nesbit didn’t have enough hamburger to make fifty patties. I got sixty hot dogs instead.”
“That’ll be fine, dear. And don’t bellow.”
She yodeled briefly, put away her bike, came around the house and approached her brother who was clipping edges. She then assumed her pseudo maturity. “Good afternoon, beast.”
“Greetings, afreet. How’s things?”