***
After breakfast, Brooke hurried Emily to her room to get dressed then walked out back to gather her gear for work. She passed John on her way to the shed.
The jumpsuit covered every inch of his body. John scraped the circular sweeper against the vents on the side of the house. They needed to be cleaned daily to prevent the air in their home from becoming completely unbreathable. It was the most hated job in the house. Brooke usually did it herself but was never afraid to use it for punishment.
Brooke couldn't see John's face when he looked at her because of the mask, but she imagined there was some irritated gaze staring back at her.
The work shed was on its last legs. The roof sagged, and Brooke swore the whole structure tilted farther to the left every day. But there wasn't any room in the budget for a new storage facility, so she made do with what she had. And besides, it wasn't the outside that mattered. It was the inside, which the shed didn't lack in at all.
Brooke opened the lock on the shed's door and pulled the door open. It was small, only around fifty square feet, but it was the perfect size to store her equipment. She checked her phone for the job orders that had come in for today.
There were two solar panel repairs in downtown San Diego, four repair orders just north of the city, and six at La Jolla, which ran right along the cliffs at the beach.
Repairs were the only thing Brooke seemed to do these days. It had been a year since she'd done a new installation. The economy was almost as dry as the desert they lived in.
Before she lugged her repair kit out to the cruiser, Brooke pulled one of the tables from the back wall. Hidden underneath was a small hatch.
Brooke pulled the door open and descended the staircase into the basement. There was a flashlight on a tiny shelf at the bottom, which she used to scan the contents around her.
The basement was even smaller than the shed above it, and Brooke had to keep her body hunched over to avoid knocking her head against the ceiling. Her late husband, Jason, had kept emergency supplies down here in case something ever happened.
The flashlight shone on twenty one-gallon jugs of water, a first aid kit, a case of MREs, and four backpacks stocked with flashlights, batteries, sleeping bags, emergency blankets, fire starters, iodine tablets, sunscreen, lip balm, and aloe.
When Jason had been home, he would come down here every Monday morning and check the inventory. It was a tradition Brooke had continued after he was gone.
After inventory was complete, Brooke relocked the shed. John peeled off the cleaning suit as Brooke passed him on her way to drop her tools off in the cruiser.
“C'mon, we don't want to be late,” Brooke said.
Sitting in Brooke's front yard was her Toyota Cruiser 70 series. Most of the paint had worn off, and it had more dents than a kicked soup can, but what it lacked in curb appeal it made up for with performance.