clock every few minutes from ten until eleven, then every few seconds until midnight. Even Dad, who was rarely stirred by anything outside himself, glanced often at the clock.
11:59.
I held my breath. One more minute, I thought, before everything is gone.
Then it was 12:00. The TV was still buzzing, its lights dancing across the carpet. I wondered if our clock was fast. I went to the kitchen and turned on the tap. We had water. Dad stayed still, his eyes on the screen. I returned to the couch.
12:05.
How long would it take for the electricity to fail? Was there a reserve somewhere that was keeping it going these few extra minutes?
The black-and-white specters of Ralph and Alice Kramden argued over a meatloaf.
12:10.
I waited for the screen to flicker and die. I was trying to take it all in, this last, luxurious moment—of sharp yellow light, of warm air flowing from the heater. I was experiencing nostalgia for the life I’d had before, which I would lose at any second, when the world turned and began to devour itself.
The longer I sat motionless, breathing deeply, trying to inhale the last scent of the fallen world, the more I resented its continuing solidity. Nostalgia turned to fatigue.
Sometime after 1:30 I went to bed. I glimpsed Dad as I left, his face frozen in the dark, the light from the TV leaping across his square glasses. He sat as if posed, with no agitation, no embarrassment, as if there were a perfectly mundane explanation for why he was sitting up, alone, at near two in the morning, watching Ralph and Alice Kramden prepare for a Christmas party.
He seemed smaller to me than he had that morning. The disappointment in his features was so childlike, for a moment I wondered how God could deny him this. He, a faithful servant, who suffered willingly just as Noah had willingly suffered to build the ark.
But God withheld the flood.
When January 1 dawned like any other morning, it broke Dad’s spirit. He never again mentioned Y2K. He slipped into despondency, dragging himself in from the junkyard each night, silent and heavy. He’d sit in front of the TV for hours, a black cloud hovering.
Mother said it was time for another trip to Arizona. Luke was serving a mission for the church, so it was just me, Richard and Audrey who piled into the old Chevy Astro van Dad had fixed up. Dad removed the seats, except the two in front, and in their place he put a queen mattress; then he heaved himself onto it and didn’t move for the rest of the drive.
As it had years before, the Arizona sun revived Dad. He lay out on the porch on the hard cement, soaking it up, while the rest of us read or watched TV. After a few days he began to improve, and we braced ourselves for the nightly arguments between him and Grandma. Grandma was seeing a lot of doctors these days, because she had cancer in her bone marrow.
“Those doctors will just kill you quicker,” Dad said one evening when Grandma returned from a consultation. Grandma refused to quit chemotherapy, but she did ask Mother about herbal treatments. Mother had brought some with her, hoping Grandma would ask, and Grandma tried them—foot soaks in red clay, cups of bitter parsley tea, tinctures of horsetail and hydrangea.
“Those herbs won’t do a damned thing,” Dad said. “Herbals operate by faith. You can’t put your trust in a doctor, then ask the Lord to heal you.”
Grandma didn’t say a word. She just drank her parsley tea.
I remember watching Grandma, searching for signs that her body was giving way. I didn’t see any. She was the same taut, undefeated woman.
The rest of the trip blurs in my memory, leaving me with only snapshots—of Mother muscle-testing remedies for Grandma, of Grandma listening silently to Dad, of Dad sprawled out in the dry heat.
Then I’m in a hammock on the back porch, rocking lazily in the orange light of the desert sunset, and Audrey appears and says Dad wants us to get our stuff, we’re leaving. Grandma is incredulous. “After what happened last time?” she shouts. “You’re going to drive through the night again? What about the storm?” Dad says we’ll beat the storm. While we load the van Grandma paces, cussing. She says Dad hasn’t learned a damned thing.
Richard drives the first six hours. I lie in the back on the mattress with Dad and Audrey.