The Mandibles: A Family, 2029–2047. Lionel Shriver

       chapter one

       Gray Water

      Don’t use clean water to wash your hands!”

      Intended as a gentle reminder, the admonishment came out shrill. Florence didn’t want to seem like what her son would call a boomerpoop, but still—the rules of the household were simple. Esteban consistently flouted them. There were ways of establishing that you weren’t under any (somewhat) older woman’s thumb without wasting water. He was such a cripplingly handsome man that she’d let him get away with almost anything else.

      “Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned,” Esteban muttered, dipping his hands into the plastic tub in the sink that caught runoff. Shreds of cabbage floated around the rim.

      “That doesn’t make sense, does it?” Florence said. “When you’ve already used the clean, to use the gray?”

      “Only doing what I’m told,” her partner said.

      “That’s a first.”

      “What’s put you in such a good mood?” Esteban wiped his now-greasy hands on an even greasier dishtowel (another rule: a roll of paper towels lasts six weeks). “Something go wrong at Adelphi?”

      “Things go nothing but wrong at Adelphi,” she grumbled. “Drugs, fights, theft. Screaming babies with eczema. That’s what homeless shelters are like. Honestly, I’m bewildered by why it’s so hard to get the residents to flush the toilet. Which is the height of luxury, in this house.”

      “I wish you’d find something else.”

      “I do, too. But don’t tell anybody. It would ruin my sainted reputation.” Florence returned to slicing cabbage—an economical option even at twenty bucks. She wasn’t sure how much more of the vegetable her son could stand.

      Others were always agog at the virtuousness of her having taken on such a demanding, thankless job for four long years. But assumptions about her angelic nature were off base. After she’d scraped from one poorly paid, often part-time position to another, whatever wide-eyed altruism had motivated her moronic double major in American Studies and Environmental Policy at Barnard had been beaten out of her almost entirely. Half her jobs had been eliminated because an innovation became abruptly obsolete; she’d worked for a company that sold electric long underwear to save on heating bills, and then suddenly consumers only wanted heated underwear backed by electrified graphene. Other positions were eliminated by what in her twenties were called bots, but which displaced American workers now called robs, for obvious reasons. Her most promising position was at a start-up that made tasty protein bars out of cricket powder. Yet once Hershey’s mass-produced a similar but notoriously