If Lincoln’s freshman year had been an episode of Quantum Leap, Scott Bakula would have gotten back on the Greyhound bus after Christmas, finished the school year like a man, and started making calls to the financial aid office at the University of Nebraska. Or maybe he wouldn’t have transferred at all. Maybe Scott Bakula would have stayed in California and asked that pretty girl in Lincoln’s Latin class if she wanted to see a Susan Sarandon movie.
“DO YOU LIKE basset hounds?”
Lincoln was sitting in The Courier break room eating homemade potato soup and still thinking about Scott Bakula and Sam when Doris interrupted him. She was loading Diet Pepsi into the machine behind him.
Lincoln wasn’t exactly sure what Doris’s job was. Whenever he saw her, she was stocking the vending machines, but that didn’t seem like it should be a full-time job. Doris was in her sixties with short, curly gray hair, and she wore a red vest, sort of a uniform, and large eyeglasses.
“Excuse me?” he asked, hoping he sounded polite, not confused.
“Basset hounds,” she said, pointing to the open newspaper in front of him. There was a photo of a basset hound sitting on a woman’s lap.
“I’d never have a basset hound if I lived so close to the ocean,” she said. Lincoln looked at the photo. He didn’t see any ocean. Doris must think he’d already read the story.
“They can’t swim, you know,” she said. “They’re the only dogs who can’t swim. They’re too fat, and their legs are too short.”
“Like penguins,” Lincoln said thickly.
“I’m pretty sure penguins can swim,” Doris said. “But a basset hound will drown in the bathtub. We had one named Jolene. Oh, she was a pretty little girl. I cried all night when we lost her.”
“Did she drown?” Lincoln asked.
“No,” Doris said. “Leukemia.”
“Oh,” he said, “I’m sorry.”
“We had her cremated. Put her in a nice copper urn. It’s only this big,” Doris said, holding up a can of Wild Cherry Pepsi. “Can you believe it? A full-grown dog like Jolene in a tiny, tiny urn? There’s not much to any of us once you take out all the water. How much is left in a person, do you think?” She waited for an answer.
“Probably less than a two-liter,” Lincoln said, still feeling like it would be rude to act as if this was anything other than normal conversation.
“I’ll bet you’re right,” Doris said sadly.
“When did she pass?” he asked.
“Well, it was when Paul was alive, let’s see, sixteen years ago. We got two more basset hounds after that one, but they weren’t as sweet …Honey, do you need any change while I’ve got this thing open?”
“No,” Lincoln said. “Thank you.”
Doris locked up the Pepsi machine. They talked a bit more about Jolene and about Doris’s late husband, Paul, whom Doris missed but didn’t get all choked up about the way she did Jolene. Paul had smoked and drank and refused to eat vegetables. Not even corn.
By the time she got to Dolly, her first basset, and Al, her first husband, Lincoln had forgotten that he was talking to Doris just to be polite.
HE STAYED HOME from work the next day. He went to his sister’s house instead and helped her bring Christmas decorations down from the attic. “Why aren’t you at work?” she asked, untangling a chain of plastic cranberries. “Did you just feel like taking a break?”
He shrugged and reached for another box. “Yeah. A break from taking a break.”
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
He’d come to Eve’s house because he knew she’d ask him that. And he’d hoped that when she did ask, he’d have an answer. Things tended to come into focus when she was around.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I just feel like I have to do something.”
“Do what?”
“I don’t know. That’s what’s wrong. Or part of what’s wrong. I feel like I’m sleepwalking.”
“You look like you’re sleepwalking,” she said.
“And I don’t know how to wake up.”
“Do something,” she said.
“Do what?”
“Change something.”
“I have,” Lincoln said. “I moved back. I got a job.”
“You must not have changed the right thing yet.”
“If I were in a movie,” he said, “I’d fix this by volunteering with special-needs kids or the elderly. Or maybe I’d get a job in a greenhouse …or move to Japan to teach English.”
“Yeah? So are you going to try any of those things?”
“No. I don’t know. Maybe.”
Eve looked at him coolly.
“Maybe you should join a gym,” she said.
CHAPTER 38
From: Beth Fremont
To: Jennifer Scribner-Snyder
Sent: Tues, 11/16/1999 2:16 PM
Subject: My Cute Guy.
We’re not calling him My Cute Guy anymore.
> I don’t think I ever called him that.
> We’re calling him My Very Cute Guy. Or maybe My Very Cute, Kind, and Compassionate—and Also Sort of Funny—Guy.
> Not very catchy. Does this mean you have new cute-guy information to share?
> Duh. Yes. I worked kind of late last night, and when I went to the break room around 9 for a delicious packet of Cheez-Its, guess who was sitting right there for all the world to see? My Cute Guy. He was eating his dinner and talking to Doris.
> Doris, the vending machine lady?
> None other. She was talking to him about her dog. Her dead dog, I think. Actually, there’s a chance she was talking about a dead child, but I don’t think so. Anyway. Doris was talking about her dog, and My Cute Guy was listening attentively and asking follow-up questions, nodding his head. (It was very involved. I don’t think they even noticed me ogling.) He could not have been nicer.
> Maybe he just likes to talk about dead dogs.
> Or cuter. He could not have been cuter.
> And funny? How was he funny?
> It’s hard to explain. Doris was asking him if a dead body would fit into a can of Pepsi, and he said it would probably fit better into a two-liter.
> That sounds gruesome. Has anyone seen Doris today?
> In context, it wasn’t gruesome. I think she was talking about cremating her dog. I was eavesdropping, not taking notes. The important thing is, he was nice—really, really nice.
> And really, really cute.
> Oh my God, yes. You have got to see this guy. You know how I said he looked like Harrison Ford? I’ve had a better look now. He’s Harrison Ford plus the Brawny paper towel guy. He’s just massive.
> Like Mr. Universe massive?
> No …he’s more like the guy they would have cast as the Hulk if they’d made a live-action Hulk movie in the forties or fifties, back when powerful didn’t mean chiseled. Like if you saw John Wayne with his shirt off, he wouldn’t have had a six-pack, he’d just look like the kind of guy you’d want on your side during a fight. Like maybe this guy, My Cute Guy, lifts weights. Dumbbells in his garage or something. But he’d never touch a protein shake.
You know what? We might have to start calling him My Handsome Guy. He’s a little deeper than cute.
> Okay, I can see him now. Harrison Ford plus John Wayne plus the Hulk plus the Brawny guy.
> Plus Jason Bateman.
> Who’s Jason Bateman?
Also, why were you still here last night at nine o’clock?
>
1. Jason Bateman was the best friend on Silver Spoons.
2. You know I like to work late.
>
1. The g
uy from Fresh Prince?
2. I just can’t understand why you wouldn’t rather be home.
>
1. The other best friend. The white guy. With the crinkly eyes and the interesting nose. His sister was on Family Ties.
2. I like to work late because I don’t like to work early—and I have to work sometime.
If I get here first thing in the morning, I feel like I have to iron my clothes. But by 2 o’clock, nobody cares. And by 7, nobody’s here. (Well, except copy editors, and they only half count.) Besides, it’s kind of cool, being here at night. It’s like being in the mall after it closes. Or at school on a Saturday. Plus, sometimes I legitimately have to work late. Like, if I have to write a review on opening night or something.
> I guess I just don’t like being here that late. The year I worked on the nightside desk was the loneliest year of my life.
And I guess I know who Jason Bateman is. I’ve just never thought of him as cute.
> Well, think again. And My Cute Guy is even cuter.
CHAPTER 39
NO, NO, NO, Lincoln thought.
CHAPTER 40
NO.
It couldn’t be …
She couldn’t mean …
He stood up from his desk, walked around the empty information technology office. Sat back down. Reread the e-mail. Cute, she’d said. Massive, she’d said. Oh my God, she’d said.
Handsome.
No. It must be a mistake, she couldn’t have meant …No.
He stood up again. Sat down. Stood up. Started walking toward the men’s bathroom. Was there a mirror in there? What did he need to look at, anyway? To see if he still looked like himself? There was a mirror. Full-length. He looked at his reflection. Massive, he asked himself. Really? Massive?
Definitely big. In high school, the football coach was always trying to recruit him, but Lincoln’s mother had forbidden it. “No, you’re not joining the head-injury team,” she’d say. He laid his hand on his stomach. You’d call it a beer gut if Lincoln drank beer more often than once a month. Massive.
But cute, she’d said. Handsome, she’d said. Crinkly eyes.
He leaned his forehead against the mirror and closed his eyes. It was embarrassing to see himself smile like that.
CHAPTER 41
THE NEXT MORNING, Lincoln joined a gym. The person on the treadmill next to him was already watching Quantum Leap on one of the big televisions. It felt like a sign.
On his way home he stopped by the bank where Eve worked. She had one of those offices in the lobby with the glass cubicle walls.
“Hey,” she said, “do you need to open a savings account? Yuck. Why are you all sweaty?”
“I joined a gym.”
“You did? Well, good for you. Does that mean you’re listening to my advice now? I wish I would have told you to get your own apartment. Get your own apartment!”
“Can I ask you a weird question?”
“If you make it quick,” she said. “All those people sitting over there on the couches actually do want to open savings accounts.”
“Do I look like Jason Bateman?”
“Who’s Jason Bateman?”
“The actor. He was on Silver Spoons and The Hogan Family.”
“The guy who played Teen Wolf?”
“That’s Michael J. Fox,” Lincoln said. “Never mind. This wasn’t supposed to be a whole conversation.”
“The guy who played Teen Wolf in Teen Wolf Too?”
“Yes,” Lincoln said. “Him.”
Eve squinted.
“Yeah,” she said. “Actually, you do kind of look like him. Now that you mention it, yeah.”
Lincoln smiled. He hadn’t stopped smiling.
“Is that a good thing?” Eve said. “Do you want to look like Jason Bateman?”
“It isn’t good or bad. It just confirms something.”
“You’re a lot bigger than he is.”
“I’m leaving,” Lincoln said, walking away.
“Thanks for choosing Second National,” she called after him.
IT TOOK FOREVER for the IT office to clear that night. Everyone was getting pretty intense about the millennium bug. Kristi, Lincoln’s desk-mate, wanted to stage a practice New Year’s Eve, to see if their code patch would work. But Greg said that if they were going to shut down the newspaper and maybe cause a six-block blackout, they might as well wait until the real New Year’s Eve when it would be less embarrassing. The members of the International Strike Force stayed out of the argument. They just sat in the corner, coding, or maybe hacking into NORAD.
Lincoln was still trying to monitor their progress and to help, but they avoided him. He was pretty sure they knew he wasn’t one of them, that he’d never actually taken a computer course, and that he’d scored higher on the verbal section of the SAT. The IT kids all wore off-brand Polo shirts and New Balance tennis shoes and the same smug look. Lincoln refused to ask for their help with the digital color printer upstairs, even though he was at his wit’s end with the damn thing. Every few days it would have a crazy spell and start spitting out page after page of bright magenta.
“How can we prepare for the worst-case scenario,” Kristi was saying, “if we don’t understand the worst-case scenario?”
Lincoln was itching to open the WebFence folder. Dying to open it.
Greg said he didn’t have to drive his Nissan into the river to know it would be a fucking disaster.
“That doesn’t even compare,” Kristi said, and then she said she wished Greg wouldn’t curse. Right at the moment, Lincoln was wishing that the system really would fail at 12:01, January 1. That it would fail spectacularly. And that he’d be fired and replaced by one of the Strike Force, probably the Bosnian. But first, he wanted to check the WebFence folder. Now.
Maybe he didn’t have to wait for everyone to leave …It wasn’t a secret that he checked the WebFence folder. It’s nothing, he told himself, checking WebFence is my job. Which was such a lame rationalization that he decided not to let himself check it, even after everybody else went home.
When he finally opened the folder, sometime after midnight, he told himself not to expect a revelation like last night’s. What were the chances that Beth would be talking about him again? What were the chances that she’d seen him again? If she had seen him, would she have noticed that he was wearing a nice shirt and that he’d spent twenty minutes that afternoon combing his hair?
CHAPTER 42
From: Beth Fremont
To: Jennifer Scribner-Snyder
Sent: Thurs, 11/18/1999 10:16 AM
Subject: You.
Hey, how are you feeling?
> Fine. Normal. The same.
> Really?
> Really? No.
Really, I feel a little bit like a suicide bomber. Like I’m walking around pretending to be normal, all the while knowing that I’m carrying something that is going to change—possibly destroy—the world as I know it.
> “Destroy” seems like kind of a strong word.
> Everyone keeps telling me that everything is going to change when the baby gets here, that my whole life will be different. That, I think, implies that the life I have now will be gone. Destroyed.
> When you fell in love with Mitch, he changed your whole life, right? He didn’t destroy it.
> Sure, he did, but that was okay. My life before Mitch sucked.
> So gloomy. If you had bunked next to the Little Orphan Annie, Annie wouldn’t have been a musical.
> Would anyone really miss it?
CHAPTER 43
OKAY, SO SHE hadn’t written more about him. But at least she hadn’t written, “I got a better look at that guy, and he’s not as cute as I thought. Not by half.” He played online Scrabble until his shift was up and fell asleep as soon as
his head hit the pillow.
“You’re up early,” his mother said, when he came downstairs the next morning at nine.
“Yeah, I think I’m going to go work out.”
“Really.”
“Yes.”
“Where are you going to do that?” she asked suspiciously, as if the answer might be “the casino” or “a massage parlor.”
“The gym,” he said.
“Which gym?”
“Superior Bodies.”
“Superior Bodies?” she asked.
“It’s right up the street.”
“I know. I’ve seen it. Do you want a bagel?”
“Sure.” He smiled. Because that was all he did lately. And because he’d given up on asking her not to feed him, especially after the confrontation with Eve. Food had always been something good between him and his mom. Something without strings. “Thanks.”
She started fixing him a bagel, thick with cream cheese, smoked salmon, and red onions. “Superior Bodies,” she said again. “Isn’t that one of those meat markets?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I’ve only been there once, and there were mostly elderly people there. Maybe the meat market starts when people get off work.”
“Hmmm,” his mother said, looking obviously thoughtful. Lincoln pretended not to notice.
“It’s just,” his mother said, “that name. It puts so much emphasis on the body. As if that’s why people should exercise, to have a good body. Not even a good body. A superior body. As if people should go around looking at each other and thinking, ‘My body is so far superior to yours.’”
“I love you, Mom,” he said. He meant it. “Thanks for breakfast. I’m going to the gym.”
“Do you shower there? Don’t use the shower. Imagine the fungus, Lincoln.”
“I will now.”
IT WASN’T HARD going to the gym, as long as he went as soon as he woke up, before he had time to think about not going. Those morning workouts made him feel like he was starting his day like a pinball, with a giant shot of momentum. The feeling sometimes didn’t wear off until six or seven at night (when it was usually overtaken by the feeling that he was just bouncing haplessly from one situation to the next without any real purpose or direction).