Fixer by Gene Doucette Page B

of the commune had ended up in an empty farmhouse in southern Maine and how nobody had tried to chase them off while firing large guns at them. 
    Somewhat less explicable, was the fully stocked walk-in freezer. They’d been grazing happily on the goods in there since they had arrived, which only forestalled what would soon be a problem. As possibly the only person there who’d remained straight for over twenty days, Violet had found the time to do a little math. Unless there was a second walk-in freezer elsewhere in the house, the Bluff commune would run out of food entirely sometime around the middle of December. 
    She tried to bring this up with Charlie in case there was an equally impressive supply of cash stowed somewhere in the place, but all she got out of him was a lengthy, very one-sided discussion on the evils of money, capitalism, and the fascist tendencies of the government of the United States, not necessarily in that order. Then he offered her a tab, which she politely declined.
    So the whole food thing was a problem, and one that Violet—as a mother —was going to have to deal with eventually. She was perfectly happy to go without food for an entire winter, but little Corry needed his nutrition. 
    Vi’s template of motherhood was crafted out of twenty years’ worth of detergent commercials and Leave It To Beaver -type programs, which explained both why she was consistently unprepared for any issue that could not be resolved between thirty seconds and thirty minutes and why she always felt so thoroughly inadequate. But she knew enough to understand that children needed healthy food that two-month drug benders couldn’t replace. These were the thoughts that occupied her as she walked from room to room, casually looking for her son. This was nothing like the panic that had overtaken her on their first night in the house; she knew he was around somewhere. If there was a good thing to be said about the people Charlie had collected for his Grand Walden Experiment, it was that everyone was cool. She didn’t have to keep a constant eye on Corry, because wherever he was, an adult was watching out for him and not in any weirdly inappropriate kind of way. And little Corrigan was an easy child to keep an eye on.
    The house was actually pretty big. It had seemed to her that she was in much more drastic straits when she woke up on that first night, but she’d actually been in the largest bedroom upstairs, and the reason she’d been sharing that room with everybody else in the place was that they’d lost the fire. The fireplace was very temperamental, meaning it wouldn’t work if nobody remembered to pull in some wood from the yard and give it time to dry. They had all been together because it was warmer that way. 
    There were a total of fifteen rooms to the farmhouse, not counting the barn across the yard. Miraculously, one of those rooms was an indoor bathroom with a standing shower. Hot water was at a premium, and the toilet backed up all the time, but all anyone had to do when they felt like complaining about it was look out in the middle of the backyard and see the snow-covered outhouse for an idea of what things were like here before Charlie’s grandparents had decided to spend a little cash on creature comforts. 
    Electricity was a wondrous thing when they had it, which was only about half the time. The electricity only reached the house via aerial wires, and if any wire in the county went down, so did the entire county’s electrical supply. With the weather as it was that happened pretty often. They had a phone that also relied largely on the caprice of the weather, but since nobody there ever had a dire need to make a phone call—anyone they might have wanted to phone was already there—this was less of a noticeable problem.
    She started on the first floor, in the living room. As the second largest room in the house and the only one with a functioning fireplace, it was where most of the commune’s