•••
A nurse came in—Denise, whose voice she had recorded. Alice scooted back in her chair, sitting up straight. Denise waved a hand. “Be comfortable,” she said. Alice nodded, and watched while Denise inspected various machines and replaced bags of opaque fluids on the poles next to Leonard’s bed.
“You’re a good girl,” Denise said on her way out, and patted Alice’s knee. “I told your father already, but I lovedTime Brothers—when I was in nursing school, my roommate and I were Scott and Jeff for Halloween. I told your father. I was Jeff, when he had a mustache. Very good costume, everyone knew who I was.Until the future!” That was their catchphrase, three words that Leonard found mortifying but that were often shouted to him while he walked down the street, or written in pen on his check at restaurants.
“I bet you looked great,” Alice said. TheTime Brotherscharacters made good costumes—not as snug as a spandexStar Trekuniform, 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 theNew York Timescrossword 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 theTime Brothersbrothers 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 aTop Chefchef.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 whatevershe 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.
It didn’t help that her father had always treated marriage like a horrible disease he had overcome. Being a divorced single father suited him—he loved Alice and her friends, he loved going to the playground, he loved eating in front of the television, all in equal measure to the way he had hated all the things that marriage had once made him do. He didn’t like buying Christmas presents for relatives he didn’t otherwise speak to. Leonard could not abide dinner parties, or making small talk with parents he found boring. He was eccentric in a way that private school parents were not used to, meaning he was not exactly like everyone else. There had been women, at various points, whom Alice had imagined might be her father’s girlfriends, but they never stayed the night or so much as kissed her father on the cheek in front of her. The hardest thing for Alice to picture was her father and mother together, in the same room, touching. Not even in an intimate way—touching in any way. A hand on a shoulder. Arms, side by side. They’d been married for almost ten years, four years before Alice was born and six after. When Alice was in first grade, Serena left for California, and they were separated by the entire country.
She had known happy married couples, of course—friends’ parents whose lives she got to inhabit during sleepovers and on holiday weekends—but it always felt like watching a nature documentary.Here is a heterosexual American couple in the year 1989—watch as they prepare a tomato sauce for dinner while occasionally touching each other’s posteriors in a playful manner.It wasn’t real life. For the first time, Alice wished that her father had been some other kind of dad, a boring one with a set of golf clubs in the trunk of his car. With a car, period. And someone kind sitting in the passenger seat. If he’d been a dentist instead of an artist, if he’d been an accountant, aveterinarian, or a plumber, like his own father had been, maybe his life would have worked out differently. If her parents had stayed married, they would have been miserable. Surely this was what they had discussed at the time—which misery was the most important, which sadness was the heaviest? Was it the lack of whatever unknown happiness might still be ahead of them? Was it Alice’s feelings? She doubted they had thought quite this far ahead.
The evening had begun to cool, and Alice shivered, wishing that she’d thought to wear another layer. The restaurant was in the lobby of a hotel on Central Park South. She walked along the park, passing the horses hitched up to hansom cabs, their drivers lazily trying to wave down tourists with money to burn. She narrowly avoided a pile of dog shit, and then a pile of horse shit. The leaves of every tree in Central Park shimmered in the last gasp of sunlight. People who didn’t love New York could just fuck all the way off. Look at this place! Look at these benches, at these cobblestones, at these taxicabs and horses side by side! Whatever happened, she had this. Alice exhaled, stepped off the curb, and waited for a break in traffic before running across the street.
9
The restaurant was so dark that Alice had to put her hand along the wall as she walked down the two steps and toward the hostess stand, where three tall women in identical black dresses stood stone-faced, and for a moment Alice thought that it might be so dark that they actually couldn’t see her, but then the woman in the middle said, “Can I help you?” Alice cleared her throat and gave them Matt’s name, and one of the other women silently turned, holding out her flat hand like a mime delivering an invisible cocktail. She turned a corner into the dining room, and Alice followed.
The floor was black, glossy as a marble, and Alice stepped gingerly, afraid she might slip. All of the chairs were covered in what looked like draped tablecloths, the way furniture is covered in period piece films, to be whipped off by a fleet of servants just before the rich family arrives. Matt was sitting at a table along the far wall, handsome in a suit.
“Hi,” Alice said, kissing him on the cheek before settling into her chair. It felt like sitting on a badly folded fitted sheet.
Matt picked up his glass and took a gulp. “Hey,” he said. “Isn’t this place crazy?”
Alice looked around. The waitstaff were all wearing silk pajamas, which seemed like a terrible idea, in terms of stains and dry-cleaning bills. The restaurant was new. Alice hadn’t worked in food service, but she was a native New Yorker, which meant that she knew the statistics for how many restaurants failed. Her hopes were not high. At least nowadays gorgeous celebrity chefs could always turn back to television.
A silk-pajamaed server came over and deposited menus on the table—each one a leather-backed tablet nearly two feet long. As far as Alice could tell, the food items were described only by their ingredients and not by their final form:pea shoots,kabocha squash,handmade ricotta. Sage,egg,brown butter. Oyster mushrooms,sausage.“Can I have a large glass of wine, please? White? Nothing sweet?” Alice said before the woman walked away.
