Desert Chemistry

"Dammit!" I shouted. "Dammit, dammit, dammit!"

David spun around in his chair, startled, and turned to look at me. "What?"

"My landlord is raising my rent," I said. "A lot. I'm not sure I can afford it."

I read through the letter again. "Plus, they want me to sign a year lease or I'll have to pay even more."

"What are you going to do?" David asked.

"I'm going to move, I guess," I said. "I can't afford the rent increase, especially since I can't do a full year. My contract is up in May, and I don't think I'll get another extension. I'm not grant-funded, and I was really lucky to get this year."

"Sorry, Allison," he said. "That sucks, especially this time of year. Let me know if there's anything I can do."

I sat for a while, quietly fuming.

"You do know Leo thinks you're awesome, don't you?" he asked. "He's pushing to get you a faculty position."

"Yeah," I replied, "he told me. But not even Leo gets everything he wants, especially with the politics in this state. You remember that thing with the senator last summer."

"Don't remind me," he said. "I wanted to punch him in the face. I don't get how some retired accountant from Mesa thinks he can veto research he doesn't understand just because he doesn't like the idea that it might maybe someday put biofuels into his gas tank."

"He's the chairman of the budget committee, that's how," I said.

"I know how it works," he replied angrily. "Doesn't make it right."

David was normally a pretty easygoing guy, but politics and funding decisions pushed all his buttons. I didn't press it any further.

That afternoon, I looked online for apartments, and I confirmed what I already knew. There are two types of apartments near campus: dumpy student housing and nice, professional places. I really didn't want to live in the former, but I couldn't afford the latter on a post-doc salary. My little complex had been the one bit of middle ground. It was older and in need of renovation, but it was clean, homey, and relatively cheap, at least until the end of the summer. The real estate market in the Phoenix area had finally started to recover from the financial crisis, at least in the area around campus, and I knew they'd get what they were asking without a problem. Just not from me.

I found three places that didn't look terrible, and I went to see one each from Tuesday to Thursday after work. David came with me, doing his helpful, protective older brother thing. It was sweet, and it was also helpful. The salespeople, men and women both, treated me differently with David in tow. They were still salespeople, but their tone shifted from pushy and dismissive to respectful and even obsequious. When they see a single woman, they see a pushover and they pounce. When the see the tall, imposing man with that single woman, they back off. It sucks, but that's the way the world works.

Friday morning, I looked over my options again.

"Wow," I said. "These all suck."

"Pretty much," David agreed. "I wouldn't want to live in any of them."

"Thanks," I replied with a snort. "You don't have to."

"You don't either," he said.

I looked at him strangely. What else was I going to do? I sure as hell wasn't commuting forty minutes to work every day.

"I've been thinking," he said. "You could move in with me."

My strange look turned into outright bewilderment. "Ah, no," I said. "That's sweet, but your nieces' room isn't my idea of home."

"Not the guest room. The office," he said. "Just hear me out, okay?"

I nodded and tried to look a little more normal.

"It's been empty since Melanie moved out," he said. "It's big, it has a full bathroom, and it's on the other side of the house from my bedroom. It doesn't have a kitchen, but otherwise it's like a little apartment."

"I guess," I replied, still skeptical. I didn't want to be a charity case. I was the one who took people in, not the other way around.

"I'll charge you rent," he said, sensing my doubts. "Fair market value for a room like that in my neighborhood is about two thirds of what you're paying now."

I didn't want to accept, to be dependent on somebody else, but my other options really were terrible, and this one sounded really nice. It was a beautiful house, plenty big for the both of us. And, honestly, I liked the idea of living with him.

"You need a place," he said, "and I wouldn't mind a little extra income." We both knew it was a lie, that he didn't need the money, but it was good enough.

"Okay," I said, relieved to have solved my housing problem. "Can I move in this weekend?"

"Sure," he replied. "I'm looking forward to it."

There was a twinkle in his eye as he said it, the kind I hadn't seen in a long time, and it surprised me. What surprised me more was how happy I felt about the whole thing. I hadn't been that excited about living with anyone since, well, since Anne.

I sold my excess furniture online and rented a truck to cart the rest of my stuff to David's house over the weekend. We adopted the standard moving strategy of bribing friends with pizza. Melissa, Lakesha and Julie all came, as did Jonsey, Craig and Guillermo. Jonsey couldn't really carry anything, but he did help pack and unpack books and kitchen stuff. The actual moving only took a couple hours, and everybody hung out by the pool afterwards.

~~~

The first week at David's house was strange. I missed my little apartment, with everything set up just the way I wanted it. The house was nicer in every way, with lots of space, a great kitchen, and a comfy living room that I helped pick out, but it was different, and I didn't want different right then. I was grumpy and resentful at having to move at all, and I'm sure I wasn't the most fun person to be around. David didn't seem to notice, though. He was almost annoyingly cheerful.

Our first dinner alone together was Tuesday night Chinese takeout. David insisted on sitting at the dining room table and using real plates, and I have to admit it was kind of nice.

"This is your place now too," he said over eggrolls and mu shu pork. "You know that, don't you?"

"Yeah," I replied. "It's just weird. I still feel like I'm invading. It'll take me a while to get over it."

"Don't feel like you can't do stuff because of me," he said.

"How about wandering around naked?" I asked. "It's too hot to wear a sleep shirt in the summer."

"Okay, maybe not that," he replied, blushing. "I was thinking of cooking or having your friends over to hang out. Stuff like that."

"I was just teasing," I said with a giggle. "I'll wear something for midnight refrigerator raids."

"Seriously, though, thank you," I said in a more serious tone. "Maybe I'll invite Julie and Melissa over this weekend."

David shook his head at me and laughed. We finished dinner, I volunteered to wash the dishes, and we both read for a few hours before bed.

Wednesday, I went to the rec center after work, then an evening lecture and discussion on women in science. After that, I went out for a late dinner and drinks with a couple other post-docs. I didn't get home until after midnight. When I walked in the door from the garage, Lucie was in guard dog mode. The hair along her spine stood straight up, and she started barking at me like I was an intruder. I just stood there at the door saying "It's okay" over and over again. Anytime I moved, she dug her feet into the carpet and growled. After about ten minutes, she finally decided I was okay and padded off toward David's room. He slept through the whole thing. Lucie was perfectly sweet and happy to see me in the morning, and David and I had a good laugh when I told him about it.

Friday night, David's sister Joan and her family brought dinner over to the house, and Sophie and Lisa stayed overnight. David and Joan didn't look much like brother and sister at first glance - his build is big and loose and his sandy hair unruly, while she's compact and controlled, and never a hair out of place - but the similarities were unmistakable if you pay attention. They have the same straight nose, the same dimpled chin, the same blue-green eyes. Most striking of all is their easy laugh, musical as a bell, his an octave deeper than hers, with the same crinkled nose and smile lines around their eyes.

Joan and her husband Greg made me feel like family, even though I was just renting a room. It was a nice feeling, something I had missed since I moved away from home. I was a little surprised when I got hugs from both girls before they went to bed.

"I'm so happy you're living with Uncle David," Sophie said to me. "He smiles a lot more."

"We're just roommates, Sophie," I said. "We're not together like he was with Melissa."

"I know," she replied. "But I like you better anyway."

I didn't know how to respond to that.

Early the next morning, while David and the girls were still asleep, I woke feeling like I was being watched. When I opened my eyes, I saw Lucie sitting right next to the bed, staring at me. She was close enough that I could feel her breath on my face when she panted. There was no mistaking the expression in those intense puppy dog eyes, but I wasn't really in the mood to get out of bed. A minute later, she got impatient and a paw came thudding onto the bed next to me. At that point I knew I wasn't going to get rid of her. I got up, got dressed, and took her out for a walk around the neighborhood.

David was up when I got back. "Sorry," he said, shaking his head and laughing. "Looks like Lucie's decided she likes you."

"It's okay," I replied. "Better than barking and growling at me in the middle of the night, I guess. We had a nice walk. I think I'll probably keep my bedroom door closed in the future, though."

"Good idea," he said.

~~~

Early August, between summer and fall classes, is one of the best parts of the year for research. David was able to focus exclusively on our project for a couple of weeks, and we made great progress. He had zeroed in on a group of four enzymes, creatively labeled A to D, that between them could break down every one of the bonds in lignin, reducing it to simple alcohols, sugars and short-chain hydrocarbons.

Watching him work was kind of amazing. I'm no slouch at biochemistry, but David had this crazy instinct that turned a week of trial and error into an afternoon of success. By the time he had to start planning for fall classes, we had completely described all four enzymes.

David identified the active sites on the enzymes, their targets in the cross-linked mess that is typical of lignin, the final products of their activity, and even some of the intermediates. But how did they really work, at the level of the individual atoms involved? We needed to understand that if we were going to come up with synthetics. That was where I came in.

There's no way to directly watch reactions on that scale, so reconstructing the process requires a lot of guesswork. There are some new techniques involving ultra-short laser pulses that can, if you're lucky, capture an intermediate state or two, but mostly it's about computer models.

I spent weeks building and rebuilding my models, trying to get them to match our observations, and finally I had something fairly close going into the second week of the fall semester. Enzyme A was a little more active in real life than in my model, and D somewhat less, but it was close enough to make useful predictions and try them out.

David and I prepared a bunch of samples with more orderly, well-known structures than natural lignin and let the four enzymes loose on them for an afternoon. I spent the next morning putting the results into the mass spec to categorize the output products, and then compared them to the models that afternoon.

By the time David walked back into our little office after his afternoon class, I was in a foul mood. None of the test reactions had come close to the models. Not a single one. I had screwed something up, and I had done so spectacularly.

"What's wrong?" David asked.

"None of the models are even close," I said. "A monkey throwing darts could make better predictions."

"Hmmmm," he said. "Results that bad mean you probably have an assumption in your model that doesn't hold true in the real world. What is it?"

"I don't have any fucking idea," I said. "I've been trying to figure that out all afternoon."

"You'll get it," he said. "You always do."

That conversation did absolutely nothing to improve my mood.

I spent a couple of weeks working on the models, adjusting the way they responded to pH changes and various other factors. It helped a little, but it was all just tinkering at the margins. There was something fundamentally wrong, and I wasn't going to get anything useful out of them until I figured out what.

~~~

After the initial adjustment, living with David was surprisingly easy. We already spent a lot of time together, so we didn't have to worry about getting sick of each other. The house was big enough that we could always find a place to be alone. Lucie eventually figured out when I was in a mood to pay attention to her and when I wasn't.

We started eating more at home instead of going out. I was thrilled - with a little effort, I could eat tastier, healthier food for a lot less money. I think David was happy too. At first, I did all the cooking and David paid for groceries and washed the dishes, but after a few weeks, he started cooking as well, and he was actually quite good at it.

"I had forgotten how much I enjoy this," he said one night, stirring a pot of something that smelled spicy and delicious.

"What is it?" I asked.

"Pozole," he replied. I had no idea what that was.

"Pork and hominy stew," he explained. "We really have to teach you about Mexican food."

It was amazing.

"Maggie has a date on Saturday," I said as I washed the dishes. "I offered to babysit, so I'll be at her place until fairly late Saturday night."

"Good for her," he replied. "First time going out since the accident?"

"Yeah," I said. "I really hope it goes okay for her."

"You know, she could bring the kids over here," he said. "We have a pool, and they could spend the night in the guest room."

"That sounds nice," I replied. "Are you sure you don't mind? Two little kids running around can be a lot to handle."

"It's fine," he said. "Sophie and Lisa were that age not too long ago, and they love sleeping over here. We'll have a nice time."

"Great," I said. "I'll talk to Maggie about it tomorrow."

Maggie was thrilled. The idea of a whole afternoon and night completely to herself was almost too good to be true. She dropped the kids off around two on Saturday afternoon, thanking both of us more times than I could count.

The afternoon was a smashing success. David's house may not be large, but the back yard is, especially for the neighborhood, with citrus trees along the back fence, a large pool and Jacuzzi, and a lot of empty space for the kids to run around.

We started off with a few rounds of board games inside and then went out to the pool. Casey was a little scared of Lucie at first, but he warmed up to her quickly enough. I mostly sat in the shade and watched while David and the kids swam - even with sunscreen, I have to be careful about the sun.

A thought had been bugging me all day, trying to work its way into my consciousness. It kept part of my mind occupied, and I was a little annoyed that I couldn't focus on the kids. I watched David standing guard while Isabelle and then Casey dove into the deep end of the pool from the side. Casey bent down, and then . . .

That was it! Bending. That was what I was missing in my models. I had accounted for all the ways the lignin could deform during the reaction, but I had treated the enzymes as essentially rigid. Catalysts usually are. If the enzyme could deform during a crucial step in the reaction and then snap back, that could make the models work.

After an hour and a half in the pool, the kids were ready to go inside. We decided to play board games again before dinner. Casey chose Forbidden Island because of the picture on the front of the tin. I like it because it's cooperative. We all win or lose together as a group. David set up, with Isabelle helping.

After the first round, which we won, Isabelle wanted to play again, and David let her set up the board. Casey played with some of the pieces while she did. He's three years younger than his sister and easily distracted.

"Could enzyme A deform during the reaction?" I asked David.

He looked at me for a minute like I was speaking Greek, but then he got an excited look on his face. I felt like I could see the gears shifting in his head. "I suppose it's possible," he said, nodding. "There's nothing in the structure that could scissor open or anything, but there's room for the active site to bend quite a bit."

We played two more rounds of Forbidden Island, winning one, and then had spaghetti for dinner, with a salad and fresh strawberries for dessert.

Bedtime was eight thirty, half an hour later than their usual. That triggered the only meltdown of the evening. Casey insisted that he did NOT want to go to bed, and there was a lot of crying. David sat there with him, listening calmly to his shrill protests, and explained that he could cry all he wanted, but he was still going to bed. Casey eventually cried himself out, and David read him a couple of picture books.

Isabelle just rolled her eyes at her little brother's drama. We read an actual book together, and then she brushed her teeth and went to bed without a fuss. David and I sat on the couch together after we tucked the kids in.

"You're really good at this," I said to David. "Casey was driving me bonkers, but you handled him really well."

"Lots of practice with my nieces," he said with a shrug. I thought to myself that he was going to be a great father someday. Whoever he eventually married would be a very lucky girl.

~~~

Maggie's date was a bust. The guy was nice enough, but there was no spark at all. She was, however, very happy with the time she had to herself. I volunteered to babysit again, and she promised to take me up on the offer.

I started work on new models the next Monday, accounting for the possibility of deformation in the enzymes. Within a week, I had some really promising results. We tested the predictions against actual reactions, and this time they came out pretty close. Enzyme C was still not quite right in the models, but it was fixable with some more work.

That led to the next phase: designing synthetic catalysts that would work the way the enzymes did. That took a couple more months, with five rounds where we would build a catalyst, test it out, and refine the models against the results, and then try it all again.

Thanksgiving came and went. David's sister Joan invited me to have dinner with her family, which was very sweet. The one really tough thing about living so far from Boston was not being able to spend time with my family. Joan sort of adopted me, like David had.

Joan and David's parents retired to La Jolla a year or so before I arrived because they couldn't take the Phoenix summer heat anymore, and they were off on a trip somewhere exotic over the holiday. That meant it was just Joan's family, David and me. The turkey had an ancho chili glaze, the stuffing was cornbread and green chilies, and everything was very southwestern. David brought wine and I baked fairly respectable pecan and pumpkin pies for dessert. I still missed my family, but it was the nicest Thanksgiving I could imagine away from home.

We went right back to work after the break, and I was starting to feel hopeful about ending my fellowship with a bang. Even though I only had six months left, I was confident we would have some solid results in a few months. March or April, hopefully.