And now, here we are. The first and last blank sheet of paper.
“Daphne?”
I look up to see a man not a lot taller than I am, with graying brown hair and hazel-green eyes. He’s wearing a button-down shirt and jeans and carries a single red rose.
“Hi,” I say. I make a move to stand up to—what? Hug him? I sit back down.
He hands me the rose. When he speaks his voice is pleasant and familiar. “Someone was selling them outside, and I thought I should bring a proper consolation for being fifteen minutes late.”
When he smiles, the lines around his eyes crinkle.
“You were right,” I say. I take the rose. “What took you so long?”
He shakes his head, like,Oh boy. “How much time do we have?” Jake asks me.
I take him in. Real, incarnate, across from me now. He has a birthmark under his jaw, a freckle by his left eye. All of these minute details that make up a person, that make up this person, my person.
“A lot,” I tell him. “We have a lot of time.”
Chapter Two
It started in the fifth grade with a postcard. I had just come home from soccer practice and found it waiting on my desk in my room, right on top of my dog-eared copy ofJessica Darling.
Seth, eight days. The postcard was of Pasadena—bright lights, big city.Huh.
I showed it to my parents. “What is this?” I remember asking them.
They didn’t know. They were busy, then, in those earlier days. My mother worked for a Jewish nonprofit, and my father was head of West Coast sales for a new water-filtration system. The company would fold five years later, and my father would go into pharmaceuticals for a few years before retiring entirely. My parents had always been relatively frugal, and the ups and downs of their financial life did not seem to affect them the way they did most people. At least not to me. We were comfortable. I didn’t realize until much later that my parents had made a lot ofdeliberate choices to live within their means in a town that encourages keeping up. We had the smallest house on the best street so that I could go to a great public school. All that mattered to my mom was that she had space for a garden—her roses are legendary, and in Southern California they bloom on a rolling schedule from March straight through October.
“Who is Seth?” my father asked. He was by the stove, sautéing onions. My father has always been an equal participant in the kitchen and on the cleaning committee. When my grandparents, his parents, first immigrated to this country, my grandfather opened a kosher deli. Everyone was needed and had to learn to work both behind the counter and sink—including my father.
I thought about it. Seth. I knew who he was. At least, I knew whoaSeth was. He was a grade older than me at Brentwood School. He also played soccer, and we were often on the field at the same time. Sometimes after practice if there was an extra blue Gatorade he’d give it to me. I didn’t like blue Gatorade—as far as I could tell it was the one to be avoided, because it turned your mouth an unsightly shade of purple—but I liked them from Seth.
“A kid at soccer?”
My father turned, pointed the spoon at me. “Start there.”
The next day after practice, there was no blue Gatorade. I made the first move.
“Hey, Seth.”
He was tall, with blue eyes and about as many freckles as dots on a ladybug. Red hair, too.
“Hi.”
“Did you send this to me?” I shoved the Pasadena postcard at him.
He laughed. “No,” he said. “That’s funny.”
“Why?”
He looked genuinely perplexed. “I don’t know. It’s a postcard.”
I cannot express how we went from this riveting exchange to him being my first boyfriend, but that is what happened. He asked if I’d like to accompany him to the Bigg Chill, and then we dated for one week and one day. The breakup was mutual. We were better off as friends.
And from that point on, that’s how it happened. Sometimes it would be a postcard, sometimes it would be a sheet of paper, once it was a fortune tucked into a cookie. Sometimes the note would come after I’d met him, or right before, or in the case of Hugo, six weeks in. But it always told me the same thing: the exact amount of time we’d spend together.
Up until this evening, that is, when it gave me no indication of an end at all.
