This Time Tomorrow(8)

“I bet you looked great,” Alice said. The Time Brothers characters made good costumes—not as snug as a spandex Star Trek uniform, not as collegiate as a Gryffindor robe, and easy enough to pull together out of normal clothes. Jeff had his tight jeans, his yellow raincoat, and in the later seasons, his blond mustache. Scott, the younger brother, with his long hair, plaid shirt, and work boots, had long ago become a lesbian fashion icon. Her father hadn’t known what would happen when he published the novel. He’d had no way of seeing what was ahead. The book still sold, would always sell. It wasn’t on the bestseller lists anymore, but there wasn’t a bookstore that didn’t have it on the shelves, or a teenager who didn’t have a paperback copy in their bedroom, or an adult nerd who hadn’t once dug around for a raincoat and a fake mustache, like Denise. Leonard had had nothing to do with the television show, but he did get paid every time it aired, and he had been an answer in the New York Times crossword puzzle more times than he could count. He hadn’t ever published another book, but he was always writing.

When she was a child, Alice had sometimes thought of the Time Brothers brothers as her actual siblings—it was one of the lonely games she’d played in her tiny bedroom. The actors who played Scott and Jeff had been young and handsome, barely out of their teens when the show began to air. She hadn’t read her father’s book at the time, but she understood the gist—these two brothers traveled through time and space and solved mysteries. What more did she need to know? Now the actor who played Jeff was in commercials for vitamins for seniors, winking at the camera about how even his mustache had gone silver, and the actor who played Scott was living on a horse farm just outside Nashville, Tennessee, which Alice knew because he still sent her father a Christmas card every year. Would she have to tell him about her father? Would she have to figure out how to tell the actor who played Jeff, too? He had always been a true asshole, even when she was a kid, and Alice hadn’t seen him in decades. He would send something extravagant and useless, a room-filling bouquet that he hadn’t chosen with a note that he hadn’t written. She wanted to tell her father that she was thinking about them, those two morons, one sweet and the other a buffoon.

Every time she left the hospital, Alice worried that it would be the last time she would see her father. She’d heard people talk about how their loved ones waited until they left the room. Alice stayed until visiting hours were over, and told her father that she loved him on her way out the door.





8



Matt picked the restaurant in advance, which was a welcome surprise. They had a reservation, he texted, and sent her the info. It was a place they hadn’t been before, or at least Alice hadn’t, and she put on lipstick.

Matt made reservations for dinner, she texted Sam. Some fancy place in midtown with a Top Chef chef. Sam wrote back instantly—Hot diabetic or sexy Japanese woman? I love them both equally. Alice shrugged, as if Sam could see her, and then called her on FaceTime so that she could.

“Hi,” Alice said.

“Hey, sweets,” Sam said. It looked like she was driving.

“Samantha Rothman-Wood, are you driving? Why did you pick up FaceTime? Please don’t die.”

“I’m in the parking lot of Evie’s ballet class, relax.” Sam closed her eyes. “Sometimes I take a nap sitting up.” Evie was seven, the oldest of three. There was a loud squawk from an unseen mouth. “Fuck, the baby’s awake.”

Alice watched as Sam nimbly climbed to the back seat, unbuckled Leroy from his car seat, yanked down her nursing bra, and settled the baby onto her breast. “Anyway,” Sam said. “What’s up?”

“I’m on my way to meet Matt for dinner, and it’s at this fancy place, and I don’t know, I think it might be an early birthday surprise thing, or . . .” Alice chewed on a fingernail. “I don’t know.”

Baby Leroy kicked his legs and slapped his tiny hand against Sam’s chest. “Okay,” she said. “I think this is it. I think he’s going to ask you to marry him, and it’s going to be quietly public. Like, no mariachi band, no flash mob, but, like, a ring hidden in dessert. And your waiter will know before you do.”

Alice sucked in a whistle. “Okay. Yeah. Maybe.”

Sam looked at her. “Are you breathing?”

Alice shook her head. “I’ll call you after, okay? I love you.” Sam blew a kiss and waved Leroy’s tiny hand for him. They both looked so small in the back of Sam’s SUV, a big hulking thing with one baby seat facing toward the back and a booster seat facing toward the front and Cheerios crushed into the floor mats. Alice pressed the button and made them vanish.

There had been a number of years—her twenties and early thirties—when Alice had been envious of her friends. Not only Sam, but Sam in particular. When Sam and Josh had gotten married, seeing Sam in her sleek white silk dress, dancing to Whitney Houston with all the Black women in her family and the Jewish women in Josh’s family, Alice had thought: This is what real happiness looks like, and I’m never going to have this. She had cried when Sam got pregnant the first time, and the second. Alice wasn’t proud—she’d talked it through in therapy. But then, years later, Alice had looked around and realized that while all of her friends from college had kids and couldn’t stay out late, or couldn’t sleep late, or could only meet her between the hours of 10:30 and 11:30 a.m., depending on someone else’s nap, she could still do whatever she wanted, whenever she wanted. She had come out the other side of her jealousy. Alice was free to travel, free to go home with strangers, free to do anything.