IT WAS A week later, and Sabrina still hadn’t completely forgiven Dan for not picking up the kids that day. In the hierarchy of Dan’s transgressions—which over the years had ranged from really significant things (like coming home drunk on her thirty-second birthday and flaking on their dinner plans) to everyday annoyances (like never putting the cap back on the toothpaste so it got all cakey and gross at the top of the tube)—it ranked fairly low, so she couldn’t figure out why she hadn’t been able to forget it. Maybe it was because she had finally realized that all the talk about her generation being so enlightened was bullshit. Men were supposed to be (magically!) more willing to shoulder their share of household responsibilities, and yet if Dan disappeared, Sabrina would be able to take care of the kids without him, while the reverse was definitely not true. He probably didn’t even have the nanny’s number in his phone. (Although maybe that was a good thing.) She coped not by confronting him, but by taking refuge in the snack room, which was unlike anything Sabrina had ever seen—certainly not like the pantry at her parents’, which was usually bare because her mother was always on a diet, or the break rooms anywhere else Sabrina had worked. But TakeOff seemed devoted to spending a significant amount of its latest round of funding on making sure its employees never, ever went hungry, as though the key to happy employees were bottomless bags of Baked Lay’s. There were healthy snacks, like Greek yogurt and baby carrots and hummus, but most people went straight for the Sun Chips, Snickers, Pop-Tarts, and Oreos. There was a candy dispenser that had every kind of M&M in it and a make-your-own-sundae bar on Thursday afternoons, and there was always a special snack of the week, like Magnolia Bakery cupcakes. There was also a selection of shakes made with Soylent, the meal-replacement powder that the engineers liked to eat instead of food but that Sabrina thought was pretty disgusting. She reached for a bag of trail mix, willing herself not to look at the nutritional information—trail mix was usually a bad-for-you snack masquerading as a healthy snack—and went back to her desk, where Isabel was holding a piece of paper in her hand and beaming.
Sabrina didn’t say anything to her. She just sat down, put in her earbuds, and started looking at TweetDeck again, but Isabel soon tapped her on the shoulder. Sabrina took one earbud out. “What’s up,” she said. Isabel showed her the paper she was holding. It was a handwritten note that said, in small block letters in the middle of the sheet of paper: THINKING OF YOU TODAY. That was it.
“Do you have a stalker?” Sabrina asked. “Isn’t that kind of creepy?”
Isabel laughed. “Hardly. Andrew sent it to me using Errandr. I think it’s really sweet.” She positioned the note on her desk and took a picture. “You don’t think it’s weird if I put it on Snapchat, right?” Before Sabrina could answer, Isabel tapped her phone a few times and smiled.
“What’s Errandr?” Every day there was some new app that Sabrina had never heard of. How was it possible even to keep up, let alone use them all? Sometimes Sabrina rather liked being one of the oldest people in the office (there was a guy in sales who she was pretty sure was at least forty—he gave her a nod every time he walked by her, as if to say, We’re in this together), because in most ways she was relieved not to be twenty-five anymore. But sometimes, particularly at work, it bordered on terrifying.
“It’s one of those on-demand task apps. You pay like twenty dollars or whatever and they’ll do a small errand for you.” She paused. “Not to be cocky or anything but I think he really likes me.” Her voice dropped conspiratorially. “I mean, besides the note. Did I tell you what he did last night? I was telling him about that new juice place down the street from my apartment, and he just took out his phone and Venmo’d me ten dollars so I could get a green juice this morning on my way to work.” She gestured to an almost empty plastic cup on her desk streaked with mealy green remnants of spinach and kale.
“How…romantic.” Isabel had gone back to staring at her phone and seemed oblivious to Sabrina’s barely disguised sarcasm. “So you and Andrew are like…a thing now?”
She shrugged. “A ‘thing,’ I don’t know. We’re not, like, official or anything. What does ‘a thing’ even mean anymore?”
“Beats me,” Sabrina said. “I’ve been married for six years and I’m still trying to figure it out.”
“Wow.” Isabel seemed genuinely impressed. “Six years! Crazy. What’s that like?”
“Being married? Or being married for six years?”