Minutes to Burn

Cameron noticed that she was nervously jiggling her hand, so she set it on her knee. She examined her fingers, thick and strong like a man's, free of jewelry, the nails cut short. She kept her wedding ring as a pendant on her necklace. The ring, a handsomely sized sapphire surrounded with diamond chips, served both as an engagement and wedding ring. It had cost Justin approximately twenty percent of his life savings. At first, Cameron had valiantly tried to wear the ring on her finger, but it was a constant hazard, catching in trigger guards and rip cords. She had finally given up, as Justin later had on his wedding ring, which he kept around his watchband. Moving the ring to her necklace, Cameron had resigned herself to yet another abnormality in her abnormal life.

The chanting of girls jumping rope called Cameron's attention back to the playground. The thin girl in the middle was beautiful, with curly hair bouncing across her perfectly smooth cheeks. She held her flowered dress down when she jumped, Marilyn Monroe style. When she was finished, a boy ran by and goosed her. She ignored him brilliantly, and he lingered in the shadows by the handball wall, sheepish and sullen.

For the first seventeen years of Cameron's life, every part of her had felt large and unwieldy-her solid breasts, her size-ten feet, her stomach ridged with muscle from as early as she could remember. She'd always felt thick and horsey next to other girls. Her strong hands and broad shoulders seemed all the more undainty beside their thin elegant fingers, their frail necks and girl-skinny arms. In high school, other girls always seemed busy with makeup and dating and first kisses. Cameron, on the other hand, never even bothered to get up when the phone rang. Until she met Justin, she'd been convinced she was meant to spend her life alone.

She shook off her thoughts and checked her watch. She'd have to be home soon for dinner. In the four years of their marriage, Cameron and Justin had seen less and less of each other. The timing of their tours was almost always unfortunate; one of them would leave a few days after the other returned home. And those days together were hardly blissful-last time she'd arrived home with her back thrown out and twenty-one stitches laced up her forearm, and she'd spent the hard-won three days with her husband eating microwave popcorn and watching a James Bond marathon on TV.

She and Justin had fallen in love the quiet, old-fashioned way, with unspoken assurances and soft yieldings of vulnerabilities. Cameron had sworn always to recognize their relationship as a necessity and an enchantment; together, they had sworn to always put each other first. Because of that, they'd recently resolved to restructure their lives so that they could spend more time together. They'd dropped from active duty, choosing to remain on call as reserves. The transition from full-time soldier to weekend warrior was not an easy one, and they were still trying to adjust to their new lives. The time requirements were not taxing-one weekend a month to maintain proficiency, two weeks a year active duty.

Cameron found she missed the order of the military, the rules and codes she'd kept around herself like armor. With civilian life came much more freedom, and she found herself unraveling without the imposed pressure holding her together. Justin was having an easier time with the transition, but then he'd never been the soldier she was.

They'd started looking for other work this week, and both had been startled by how useless their skills were in the real world. They'd return from days full of interviews, spent and discouraged, and sit side by side on the couch sipping beer in the dark. She'd stopped opening the bank statements.

The timing was less than perfect.

Last week, a day care building had collapsed in Oakland after only a

4.2. Cracks in the foundation from previous tremors that no one could even see. Would've gone down in a strong wind, the structural engineer had said. Seventeen kids had died, and four more were in intensive care. The photograph in the Bee focused on a bright yellow jump rope on the front lawn, framed by the majestic ruin of the building in the back-ground.

And they were only catching the secondary quakes here, the spent distant rumbles of the East Pacific Rise, which grew shallower and quieter as it twisted its way north into San Andreas, sending ripples up to Sacramento. In South America, riots followed the seismic activity up the coast from Ecuador into Colombia, but UN troops had quelled the outbreaks.

A siren blared, so piercing Cameron could feel its vibration in her teeth. Kids scrambled off the jungle gyms and swings, off the monkey bars and tetherball courts. They hit the ground, curled up in balls, hands laced over the backs of their necks. They stayed like that for a few moments, frozen little animals. The siren stopped as abruptly as it had begun, and the children resumed their activities.