“I just miss you,” Alice said. “And I miss my dad.” She let out a noise that was somewhere between a hiccup and a sob. “I’m sorry.”
“No, honey, come on! It’s okay! You know how much I love Lenny. Did he give me royalties for telling him to write a book that would make him a gazillion dollars? No. But did he thank me in the acknowledgments? Yes. Did he offer to put my kids through college? Also yes. I don’t need him to, but you never know. What if Josh gets run over by a bus, and I have to stop working? Your dad is like my personal Oprah.” She squeezed Alice’s arm. “I’m kidding. Not about him offering to put my kids through college, though—he really did.”
“I didn’t know that.” Alice could imagine it, though. She could see her dad saying it to Sam, pregnant with her first baby. He had probably wanted more kids—Alice had never considered it, they were always just a team of two, but coming from a tiny family, maybe he had wanted more. Or maybe he’d assumed that Alice would give him a grandkid or two eventually! He would never have pressured her, not in a million years, but Alice wondered if when he had gone back, Leonard had ever tried to find someone else—or if he’d ever gone back after meeting Deborah, to see if he could find her sooner. Have children of their own. Maybe he had. What else had he done that he didn’t want to tell Alice about? Probably a thousand things.
“Are you going to go see him today?” Sam asked.
Josh helped Mavis unhook her knees, and the girl disappeared into the top of the structure, which was built to look like a pirate ship.
“I’ll go this afternoon.” Alice put the cool can to her forehead. “It just sucks, you know?”
“I know.” Sam put her arm around Alice’s shoulders. “Oof, this kid just will not stop kicking me.”
“Can I feel?” Alice had reluctantly touched several pregnant bellies—teachers at school, friends from college, Sam. It always felt invasive on her part, borderline creepy. Alice had never been one of those people obsessed with babies, who would flirt across tables in restaurants and over the backs of airplane seats with any nearby child. Having a baby—carrying a baby—seemed so unfairly public, and compelled strangers to weigh in on your life choices with nary an invitation. But Alice felt like she needed proof that this world was real, that today, whenever today was, was a real day in her real life, and in Sam’s, too.
“Of course,” Sam said. She reached for Alice’s hand and put it low on her belly. “Oh, you know who just moved to Montclair? That kid—man, I guess, he’s a man now—but that kid who was a year behind us at Belvedere. Kenji?”
“Kenji Morris,” Alice said. She’d seen him a lot recently—he was the very tail of the boy train coming into her sixteenth birthday party on Pomander. A year behind them, but tall for his age, and skinny, Kenji had swayed like a willow tree. His mother was Japanese, and his father was dead. Alice didn’t think she knew anything else about him. He’d smoked Parliaments, maybe? No, he hadn’t smoked at all. They’d had Spanish together—he was good at languages, and was the only sophomore in the class.
“Right, Kenji Morris,” Sam said. “He and his kid live around the corner. He just got divorced. His daughter is Mavis’s age, and we met them in the park the other day. He’s nice! I never really knew him.”
“Let me guess—he’s a lawyer.”
“No, you fucking snob. Not every single person we went to school with is a lawyer, okay? He’s an architect.” Sam snorted.
“That’s a made-up job for men in romantic comedies.”
“That is also not true.” Sam put her head on Alice’s shoulder. “What do you want for lunch? The menu is grilled cheese or peanut butter and jelly. Or scrambled eggs.”
This time—yesterday—Alice hadn’t told Sam or her father. It seemed beside the point to tell Sam now, now that Alice knew it wouldn’t last and would probably only add to Sam’s therapy bills. Even when she hadn’t told her, the concept of it was still there, deep in their brains—no one who loved Keanu Reeves could avoid time travel for long.
“Is he bald?” Alice could picture Kenji so clearly, his black hair swooping low over one eye. Haircuts were terrible in the nineties—Caesars, baby bangs, even a few white boys with dreads—but Kenji’s hair had always had the freshly brushed quality of a kid on picture day.
“Are you kidding? His hair is as amazing as it ever was. Honestly, better, because there are some grays in there, and I don’t know if I’m just getting old, but he is fully hot. Isn’t it weird how when you’re in high school, a kid who is, like, six months younger than you but a grade behind feels like an actual baby? All the boys in our grade sucked, no offense, but there were some cuties in the grade below us. Why didn’t we go out with them?”
Mavis slid down the plastic slide, crunching a pile of leaves with her tiny sneakers. Josh had walked around to the back of the swing set.
“That’s a good question,” Alice said. She’d always had crushes on older boys. They were beautiful and adult-seeming and not remotely interested in her, except for sometimes at parties when one of them would stick his tongue halfway down her throat and then walk away when he got bored. “How did you know you wanted to marry Josh?”
Sam laughed. “I mean, did I? I don’t know. We were so young. I did, of course I wanted to, here we are, it wasn’t against my will or anything. I love him. But I think that I was too young to really know what my choices were going to mean—there’s not really any way to find out what you need to find out, you know? Like, if someone is going to be a good parent, or they have some weird, fucked-up patriarchal bullshit that won’t surface until they’re forty, or if they’re terrible with money, or if they refuse to go to therapy. There should be an app for that.”
“Um, have you seen all the dating apps? It’s literally just penises. No one is talking about the patriarchy. And if someone is, you know it’s a front for all the penises that are about to follow.” Alice paused. “You and Josh are so good together, though.”
“We are. Most of the time. But we’re also both humans, you know, with different baggage about different shit. The things that drive me crazy about him might not drive someone else crazy. But it’s a choice—still. We’ve been married for fifteen years. But I still have to choose it. That doesn’t stop.”
Mavis came down the slide again, and this time, when she crunched into the leaves, she looked up and saw her mother, and took off across the lawn at top speed. Her small body flew into Sam’s arms, and Alice watched them giggle and hug. Josh was watching, too. She hadn’t thought of it as an ongoing choice, a perennial decision, and the idea of it made her both exhausted and glad. Glad that she wasn’t the only one who felt like she was always in the middle of planning her future, and exhausted that there was no way off the ride. It reminded her of when Serena’s parents—her grandparents, though she saw them so rarely that they hardly counted as such—had abruptly decided to stop vacationing in Mexico and bought a time-share in Arizona instead, where they could golf and eat Cobb salads and drink ice-cold lemonades all within the boundaries of their gated community. It had something to do with politics, but Serena didn’t like to talk about things like that, and so that was all she said, it was politics. Scottsdale is lovely all winter. And then, when Serena’s father was sick, her mother moved him into a facility with full-time care, and then Alice’s grandmother still went back to California. Did she call every day? Send postcards for the nurses to read to him? Who knew what went into people’s decisions after fifty years of marriage? Who knew what Serena’s parents’ relationship had done to their daughter’s vision of what her own should look like? Maybe Alice was alone because Leonard had always been alone.
“Come on,” Sam said. She stood up and patted Mavis on the top of the head. Alice winked at Mavis, who blinked back with her whole face. “Time to eat.”
56