Afterwards, Kayla realized that she’d just been lucky that her mom hadn’t come home while she and Andrea were out in the back yard. On a normal day, she’d know when her mom was supposed to be home, but with the store closed, there was no telling.

As it was, when Emily got home, she found her daughter sitting in one of the lounge chairs on the back porch, wearing a strange purple and white bikini, reading a book. “Sorry I took so long,” she apologized, “but there was just one thing after another all day and I couldn’t leave.”

That was the case, too. It took a while to get the coolers cleaned out in the store, and as long as they were empty and defrosted, she figured that it was a good time to give them a good washing out, especially the freezers, which hadn’t been cleaned for too long. Once she’d gotten that done, she hopped back on the bike and rode back to the fire station to discover that the training room was cool, and almost packed with people. It had turned out that the generator could handle the load, but just barely – there was just enough power left over to keep the station’s radios on. Even nicer was the fact that Gibson had told everyone that using the emergency generator to power the air conditioners was her idea.

With that thought in mind, she walked over to the Courier for one of the digital cameras to get a picture of the people gathered in the fire station. She’d written little items from the Chamber of Commerce for the local weekly newspaper for years, and then about the time she got on council, Lloyd Weber, the owner of the paper, had started her writing some features and covering some non-Bradford government meetings – and paid her for them. It made a nice supplement to her income and was fun to do. Then, a year or so later, Weber had come to her with a proposition: work at the paper as an employee a few hours a week and learn enough so she had some idea of how to get the paper out. It was a very small operation and Weber didn’t have much backup, so if she knew how to do it, then some day in the future he and his wife might be able to take a vacation longer than six days. If he got sick or something there’d be someone else who knew how to carry on. She rarely worked more than six or eight hours a week, but last winter Weber had actually been able to spend ten days in Florida, the first time in years. It had helped to pay off the pool.

She found Lloyd sitting in an office chair on the sidewalk, in the shade of the building’s eaves, with a phone next to him, reading a book. “Might as well be here as anywhere,” he told her. “From what I hear we’re not going to have power today, so the paper goes out tomorrow instead. Do you think you can come in and help?”

“I’m not scheduled in the morning,” Emily told him, “but with the power situation I might have to do something at the store, too. If we get power back I’ll try to get someone in, but I may have to run back and forth a few times.”

“No problem, this power outage is a pain in the ass for everyone,” the old man shrugged. He had a reputation as the town curmudgeon, but over the course of a couple years Emily had come to understand that he really wasn’t the dour, cranky old fart everyone thought, but instead was a rather private man who in spite of his lifelong business really wasn’t comfortable with most people. When you got past that, he had a sparkling intelligence, a wide range of interests, and a wry sense of humor. She also learned that he’d been in the business going on fifty years and frankly was burnt out on it more than a little, just going through the motions – but she also thought that she could see how he’d gotten that way, from doing the same old thing for too long. She dimly realized that it was a trap that she could fall into.

“That’ll be fine,” he smiled. “With this power outage we won’t have to worry about finding a story for the front page.”

She took the camera over to the fire station and got some pictures, along with spending some time trying to help out. Once she got the camera back to the Courier, she decided to ride over and see how Vicky was getting along. Her best friend was about seven months pregnant. Although things had been going well, the heat had to have been putting a strain on her. She found Vicky in the shade of the back porch, wearing a string bikini that only emphasized the fact that she was pregnant. Apparently the power outage meant that they weren’t working at the big General Hardware Retailers distribution plant out by the overpass. That rarely happened as they were a 24/7 operation, too. Vicky’s husband Jason, who worked days for General and should have been at work, was there wearing only a lightweight kilt.

Jason was close to twenty years older than his wife and on the verge of retiring in his early fifties. Emily had known Jason most of her life, although not as well as Vicky, who had grown up across the back yard from his house. In that time, she’d gotten used to the fact that he often wore kilts when he was being casual around the house. He took his Scottish ancestry seriously, and had an accent he could turn on and off at will.

It went deeper than that. When they got married in their back yard not quite a year ago, Jason didn’t wear a tux, but instead his Wallace tartan kilt with all the trimmings right down to a tam-o-shanter, plaid, and a dirk in the belt. Vicky surprised a few people by not wearing a wedding gown, but a MacRae tartan kilt, and, like Jason, she had the sash, tam, and her dirk in her belt.

The dirks were more than mere decoration – although normally Jason drove a fork truck, he was also a master knife maker with over thirty years’ experience. Vicky shared his interest in knives; while she didn’t do forging or heavy machining, she had a hand at carving and engraving that was as good if not better than her husband. MacRae knives usually sold for hundreds of dollars, sometimes thousands.

Both Vicky and Jason were uncomfortably hot – it was the peak heat of the day. Emily knew from talking with Conroe at the fire station a little earlier that the power company wasn’t likely to have the electricity back on much before dark if everything went well, and it could slide on into morning. It didn’t take much talking to come up with a plan – hop into Vicky’s Dodge Stratus and go into Hawthorne to get some ice to replenish the supply Emily had laid into their refrigerators right after the power went out. While they were enjoying the air conditioned car, they could get some stuff like cold pop, so they could have a cookout around the pool at Emily and Kevin’s along in the evening. They were just now on the way back from Hawthorne, and had stopped to load more ice in Emily’s refrigerator before heading back to the MacRae’s so she could pick up the Harley.

“Hi, Kayla,” Emily said, taking in the sight of her daughter in the tiny bikini. “Hot enough for you?”

“More than hot enough,” her daughter nodded.

“Where’d you get the swimsuit?” Emily asked with mild curiosity.

“Oh, Andrea gave it to me,” Kayla smiled. “She said it was too small for her.”

It’s just about too small for you too, Emily thought but carefully did not say. She could understand her daughter wanting to wear as little as possible this afternoon, and as far as that went as soon as she got the bike back home she was going to be in a bikini too – if one not quite as radical. “Where’s JJ?” she asked, changing the subject.

“Up at Brandon’s,” Kayla replied. “I think he was planning on having supper up there.”

“I’ve got to go pick up the bike,” Emily announced. “When I get back, you can use the pool.”

“No big rush, Mom,” her daughter replied. “Andrea was here most of the day, we were in and out of the pool. I can wait a while.”

“Did the two of you have a good time?” Emily asked. Andrea didn’t quite count on the rule about not having friends over – she had been something of a sitter after all. After seeing the two girls out running in the morning, it wasn’t surprising that they’d wanted to cool off.

“Oh, pretty good. We just hung out and talked a lot,” Kayla replied.

“Good, glad you enjoyed yourself,” Emily smiled, and changed the subject again, announcing the plan for Jason and Vicky to come over for a cookout and swimming. She thought for a moment about asking her daughter to change into a swimsuit that was a little more modest, but on reflection thought that Vicky probably would still have on a tiny bikini, and really, did it matter?

“Anything I can do to help get ready?” Kayla asked.

“No, not really,” Emily told her daughter. “We won’t get around to eating until your dad gets home, but there’s some cold pop here now.”

As Emily walked back out to the car where Jason and Vicky were waiting, she thought about the fact that there really was nothing wrong about Kayla wearing a bikini. A lot of girls her age did, and she’d asked for one in the past. But she couldn’t help but remember the day at the beach years ago – Kayla must have been four, she didn’t think she could have been in kindergarten yet – and the little girl had gotten very whiny about the fact that she had to wear a top and JJ didn’t. “It’s not fair!” Kayla had cried. Emily really couldn’t argue with that, but just told her daughter that why it was that way didn’t have to make sense, it was just the way things were. Finally just to bring some peace she’d let Kayla argue her into letting her not wear the funny little bikini top; no one had really minded the four year old running around topless. She’d bought one-pieces for her daughter ever since, just so the issue wouldn’t come up again. That was probably a little narrow-minded of her, she thought to herself; Kayla had grown up a lot and that bikini just proved it.

A couple hours later the four adults and Kayla were all just resting in the pool, letting the cool of the water drive away some of the exhaustion of the day. The heat was dialing back quite a bit as the sun sank into the trees, and the whole yard was in the shade. A few hot dogs, chips, some deli potato salad from the store in Hawthorne, baked beans, and cold drinks had built all of them back up a bit.

The Holsts and the MacRaes were more than just good friends; they were well on the way to being business partners. Over a year ago it had become clear to both Kevin and Vicky, who both worked at Macy Controls outside of town, that the company wasn’t going to be there much longer. The work force now was half what it had been a year ago; Vicky had been cut in the most recent round of layoffs, but with her pregnancy that suited her just fine.

Back when Kevin bought boxes of parts that were to become Emily’s Sportster, he’d needed a place to rebuild it where she wouldn’t know what was going on. Over a cup of coffee with Jason out at the Chicago Inn, they’d worked out a deal: they’d rebuild the bike in his shop, under the cover of Kevin learning something about knife making. The idea had worked well, and Emily had been totally surprised by the bike – but Kevin had learned something about knife making, especially the forging and machining parts of it – and had learned that he liked it. In the process, he and Jason had become close friends, with Kevin learning much along the way; Jason considered him a journeyman at the blacksmith end of the business now.

When they’d first started picking up the rumblings that Macy was heading to the crapper, they’d started making backup plans. Jason had been planning on retiring from General soon in order to concentrate on making knives, and among the four of them they decided to expand the operation some. Since Jason was going to be drawing retirement pay, that gave the MacRaes a fallback position. It had been decided early on that Emily would stay at the Spee-D-Mart to provide the Holsts a backup income if the business plan didn’t work out.

There were, however, flies in the ointment. The knottiest problem was that Jason had operated his business out of his home and garage for over twenty years. That wasn’t allowed in a city residential zone, but as long as it was a one-man hobby operation no one could make much of a stink about it. However, with the three of them as an official business, and maybe more sometime in the future, it ran Jason into zoning problems, along with the fact that it would put a cramp into the MacRae home life.

Because of the work going on there, a new place would have to be in an area zoned as industrial – but they wanted to be able to run a showroom out of it, as well. The old Gulf station out by the overpass, across from the Chicago Inn had been boarded up for years and fit their requirements perfectly, since it was in the township and had very loose zoning. However, since it had been a gas station, the ground was considered polluted by leakage and the owners would have to clean it up. That was an expensive proposition; McDonald’s had looked at putting a franchise outlet there and had shied away from it.

“I don’t know too much about it, yet,” Emily said, “but at council the other night Jack was saying something about changes in the brownfield law where you can get a redevelopment exemption. We were really talking about the old Hooper plant, and I didn’t really link it with the Gulf station, at first.”

“Have you talked to Jack about it?” Jason asked.

“Other than to tell him I wanted to talk with him about it, no,” she replied. “We’d sort of penciled in today, but then the power went out.”

“About all we can do is have you look into it,” Jason shrugged. “You’ve got a better idea of where the hoops are and better government contacts. But I think we want to be fairly quick about it, because if it turns out we can get an exemption on it we might well be in a race with Mickey-D’s.”

“I’ll try to find some time in the next couple days,” Emily promised. “This power thing has got us all loused up.” She changed the subject; as far as she was concerned, the MacRae Knives move had been talked to death anyway. Something had to break in the next few months, one way or another, and there was space in a small plant out in the industrial park if time ran out and all else failed. “Have you heard anything more from Duane?”

“Yeah,” Jason nodded. “He called over the weekend. It looks like he’s got a winter job lined up, it’s even crazier than what he’s doing now.”

“Oh, wow,” Kevin shook his head. “This has got to be something. I didn’t think there was anything that could get him out of there.”

Duane was Jason’s only son, twenty-three now. He’d been born to Jason’s first wife, who’d left both of them – just disappeared – when she couldn’t take dirty diapers any longer. When the divorce for desertion was final, Jason married the sister of a co-worker. Christine had been a nice woman and they’d had a close marriage, but she was frail and turned out to have leukemia. She died when Duane was about Kayla’s age, and Duane still considered her his mother. Determined not to have yet another mother leave him, Jason had stayed away from another marriage until Duane was out of college, when he and Vicky realized that a friendship that had gone on since she had been a little girl was enough to overcome the age differential. So far, it was proving right and Jason seemed delighted to be going through the whole fatherhood experience all over again. In truth, Jason didn’t seem as old as the rest of them knew he had to be.

Duane was an outdoor nut. His goal for years had been to be a ranger for the National Park Service; during college he’d worked summers at a rafting place in North Carolina; only two days after graduating he’d started a summer-long hike of the Appalachian Trail. The Park Service wasn’t doing any hiring just then, so he’d taken a job in a fast food place for lack of anything better. Then, an old friend from the rafting place had shown up out of nowhere and offered him a new and exciting job, one that he hopped on in an instant. He was now on his second year as a raft guide in the Grand Canyon, one of the most unlikely jobs any Bradford kid could have dreamed of – not that there weren’t a few that came close, as Emily well knew.

“It’s just a temporary thing while the season is down,” Jason explained. “It’s up there in the Upper Peninsula somewhere near where he went to college, helping a couple people train their dogs for that dogsled race across Alaska.”

“The Iditarod? Wow!” Kevin shook his head.

“He won’t be racing,” Jason explained. “Well, he might do a local race some time, but he’ll learn to handle a dog sled, and I guess he gets to go to Alaska to help out during the race. This all came down a while ago but he had to do a quick turnaround between trips and didn’t get a chance to call home.”

“That’s Duane all over,” Emily sighed. “He sure likes that outdoor stuff, even if it’s forty below. Waving my bare butt around in the breeze when it’s zero was more than I ever thought I’d do.”

Kayla had been staring off into space somewhere, but Emily noticed her daughter’s ears perk up. “What’s that, Mom?” she asked.

“Oh, good grief,” Emily shook her head, a blush coming to her face. “I guess we never told you and JJ about that.” She shook her head again, then let out a sigh. She was going to have to tell the story. “Maybe you’d better not tell JJ either. What was it, a year ago last winter? You remember when Scott and Sonja Tyler invited the four of us to go up for the day, have dinner with Aaron and Amber Heisler, and use their hot tub?”

“Yeah, I think,” Kayla nodded, a grin forming on her face indicating that she knew a little more than that.

“Well, it was winter, we all had cabin fever, and it was neat to think about going out and doing something. We set it up, got all set to go, and then Vicky and I remembered Scott and Sonja saying that they didn’t wear swimsuits in their hot tub.”

“It messes up the filter or something,” Vicky added with a blush of her own.

“Mom, you didn’t!” Kayla laughed.

“Oh, yes we did,” Emily grinned, somewhat abashed. “If anyone had ever told me that I’d find myself standing in a twenty mile an hour wind at zero degrees without a stitch on along with seven other naked people I’d have thought they were crazy. It just showed that we were the ones who were crazy.”

“It was colder than somewhat,” Kevin smiled. “We sure weren’t out in it long, but that hot water felt good. The only problem was that we knew that sooner or later we were going to have to get out of it, go back inside and hope we didn’t freeze up like Popsicles on the way.”

“That’s what made it exhilarating,” Jason grinned. “Kayla, your mom and Vicky were being real chicken about it until I told them that once, well, I guess I had to be a little older than you are but not much, a bunch of us went skinny-dipping over at Coldwater Lake one dark night. It was a ‘dare you’ sort of thing. It was so dark you couldn’t really see anything, but well, it was one of the things we did when we were kids. That crowd included Vicky’s father and mother long before they got going together, and your mom’s mother.”

“Grandma?” Kayla said, eyes open with amazement.

“Your grandmother,” Jason shook his head. “Makes me realize how old I am, sometimes.”

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