> I wouldn’t guess Emilie would be throwing herself at him if he wore a wedding ring.
> Good point. Even so …I’m just not sure I’m ready to be a stepmother.
> It’s a lot to think about.
> It is.
> You’re not going to try to follow him again, are you? Now that you know what kind of car he drives?
> Hmmm. Probably not. But I’m still going to hang out in the break room a lot, hoping I’ll run into him.
> That’s fair. I don’t think you can get arrested for that. What would you do if you did run into him?
> If I literally ran into him? I’m not sure. But it might involve never washing this sweater again.
> Would you talk to him? Would you flirt with him?
> Are you kidding? What kind of a floozy do you take me for? I have a boyfriend. More than a boyfriend. I’m living in sin.
> You are a complicated woman.
> No. Doy.
CHAPTER 53
LINCOLN DIDN’T WALK by Beth’s desk that night. The next time he saw Christine, he wanted to be able to tell her that he still hadn’t. But at the end of the night, before he left, he printed out the paragraph that Beth had written about him. He figured this was crossing yet another line. (How many lines do you get?) But it was the closest Lincoln had ever come to getting a love letter—even though he didn’t really get it, he took it—and he wanted to be able to read it again. He tucked the paragraph into his wallet.
THE NEXT NIGHT, Lincoln parked his Corolla right next to The Courier’s front door.
I’m here, he thought. Find me. Follow me. Make this inevitable.
CHAPTER 54
From: Beth Fremont
To: Jennifer Scribner-Snyder
Sent: Tues, 12/21/1999 11:46 AM
Subject: They’re tearing down the Indian Hills in March.
I just got a call from the old owner. They’re having a big farewell weekend right before they start tearing out the seats. They’re expecting people to come in from out of town for it. Cinerama fans.
> That’s too bad. Every time I drove by and saw that the building was still there, I thought that maybe they were going to change their minds.
> Me, too.
At least they’re having a big party to say good-bye. That’s nice. And the proceeds are going to some film preservation charity. I’m writing a story about it.
> Will you be done by lunch?
> Probably, why?
> I was going to see if you could give me a ride. I’m meeting Mitch at the midwife’s office. It’s our first regular, prenatal visit. We’re supposed to be able to hear the heartbeat.
> Of course I can give you a ride. That’s so exciting! It’s like it’s real now. Aren’t you getting excited? Even a little?
> I think I must be. I finally told my mom that I’m pregnant. Only an excited (or stupid) person would do that.
> Was she happy? I’ll bet she was happy.
> She was. I’d just taken her to pay her gas bill, and we were having dinner at Hardee’s. I blurted it out, and she about choked on a curly fry. She was like, “A baby? We’re having a baby? Oh, a baby. Our very own baby.” I thought her response was weirdly possessive, but it was definitely positive. She kept trying to hug me.
Then she said, “Oh, I hope it’s a little girl, little girls are so much fun.” I think she meant to add “to screw up,” but whatever.
A full 45 minutes passed before she said something evil: “You better try not to gain all that weight back. Mitch never knew you when you were fat.” Which isn’t even true. I was a size 18 when Mitch and I started dating. I didn’t lose weight until years later. I told her so, and she said, “You were a size 18? At your height? I never knew it had gotten that bad.”
> Sometimes I feel really sorry for your mom …and sometimes I just hate her.
> Welcome to the last 20 years of my life. It’s like she thinks she did me a favor by raising me to believe that the entire world was out to get me, by making sure I never get my hopes up.
When I got home, Mitch was fixing the light in the spare bedroom. (I know he’s turning it into a nursery, but I’m not ready to talk about it.) It’s always weird to go from my mom to Mitch. It doesn’t seem like I should have been able to get to this life from my old one, like there aren’t even roads between those two places.
Anyway, I walked in, and Mitch—who obviously didn’t now what hell I’d just traversed—said something so nice, I was able to let it all go.
> What did he say?
> It’s kind of personal.
> I’m sure it’s deeply personal. But you can’t just say, “And then Mitch said something so wonderful, it healed the tubercular ill that is my mother” without telling me what he said.
> It’s not that profound. He just said, instead of hello, that I looked beautiful—and that, when we got married, he never realized that I would look more beautiful to him every year. He said it had nothing to do with me glowing. “Even though you are.” He was standing on a ladder when he said it, which made it seem almost Shakespearean.
> If you die in a freak combine accident, I’m going to marry Mitch and live happily ever after. (I’m going to live happily ever after because Mitch is the best husband ever. Mitch, however, will spend the rest of his life pining for his one true love. You.)
> My appointment is at 12:30.
> I’ll be ready to go by noon.
CHAPTER 55
CHUCK THE COPY editor had invited Lincoln to join the nightside breakfast club. A few editors and a few people from paste-up got together every Wednesday at noon at a diner downtown. Chuck told him the paste-up people were a cross between copy editors and artists, but with knives. He’d taken Lincoln down to the production room one night to watch them work.
The Courier still didn’t paginate on computers, so all the stories were printed out in long columns, then cut and pasted down with wax on master pages, different masters for each edition. Lincoln had watched a paste-up artist rebuild the front page on deadline, slicing and waxing columns, and rearranging them like puzzle pieces.
The paste-up artists and the copy editors were pretty sure they could still get the newspaper out on time New Year’s morning, even if the computers failed them.
“When do they not fail us?” Chuck said through a mouth full of club sandwich. “No offense, Lincoln.”
“None taken,” Lincoln said.
“Are the computers going to fail?” one of the artists asked him, licking ketchup off her thumb. She asked it like she was hoping he’d say yes. Lincoln couldn’t remember her name, but she had all-over-the-place hair and big brown eyes. He didn’t like thinking about her with an X-Acto knife.
“I don’t think so,” Lincoln said. “It’s pretty simple coding, and we’ve got a crack team of international computer experts working on it.” He’d meant that to sound sarcastic, but it had come out pretty sincere.
“Are you talking about that Croatian kid who fixed the color printer?” Chuck asked.
“Somebody fixed the color printer?” Lincoln asked.
“I just know that I’m not taking the heat if the publisher can’t read his paper while he eats his soft-boiled egg on New Year’s morning,” Chuck said. “I’m going to have child support by then.”
Even Doris was worried about the Y2K bug.
She’d asked Lincoln that week if she should even bother coming to work on New Year’s Day. When the computers all stopped, she asked, would t
he vending machines be affected? Lincoln had told her he didn’t think that anything was going to stop. He’d offered her a slice of sweet potato pie.
“I think I might stay home that night all the same,” she said. “Stock up on the basics.” Lincoln imagined a refrigerator full of turkey sandwiches and closets full of Pepsi products.
“I haven’t had sweet potato pie like this since I was a little girl,” Doris said. “I need to write your mother a thank-you note.”
Lincoln’s mother couldn’t decide if the millennium problem was a good thing or a bad thing. She was pretty sure it was going to be chaos, but maybe, she said, falling back would do everyone a little good.
“I don’t need a global network,” she said. “I don’t need to need to have my produce airmailed in from other continents. We still have a hand-crank washing machine in the basement, you know. We’ll get by.”
Meanwhile, his sister had filled a room in her basement with canned goods. “It’s a win-win,” Eve said. “If everything’s okay, I don’t have to go to the grocery store for a year. If everything isn’t okay, Mom will have to come to my house and live off SpaghettiOs—and she’ll have to like it.”
Lincoln planned on working New Year’s Eve, with the rest of the IT office. But Justin and Dena wanted him to come to a big New Year’s Eve party at the Ranch Bowl. Sacajawea was headlining, and there was going to be champagne on tap. Justin was calling it “millennial debauchery.”
And Christine had called to invite him to a Rebirthday Party that night.
“You’re not calling it that, are you?”
“Don’t tease, Lincoln. New Year’s is my favorite holiday. And this is the biggest New Year’s ever.”
“But it’s a nothing holiday, Christine. It’s an odometer turning over.”
“People love to watch odometers turn over,” she said.
“It’s a number.”
“It’s not,” she said. “It’s a chance to wake up new.”
CHAPTER 56
From: Beth Fremont
To: Jennifer Scribner-Snyder
Sent: Wed, 12/22/1999 11:36 AM
Subject: So …
How was your appointment?
> Bleah. I’ve already gained twice as much weight as I’m supposed to, even with all the throwing up. The baby was in the wrong position to hear the heartbeat, and Mitch wouldn’t stop asking the midwife questions. He wanted to know all about epidurals and episiotomies and something called “cervix ripening.” Doesn’t that sound vile? Now she’ll think we’re both crazy.
>
1. Why does your midwife think you’re crazy?
2. How does one know when one’s cervix is ripe? Do you thump it?
>
1. All of my most insane subjects come up in her office. Sex. Parenthood. Being naked in front of other people.
2. I don’t know. I was trying not to pay attention. But it’s clear that Mitch has been reading about childbirth behind my back and that he is infatuated with the idea of a natural childbirth, which seems fairly ludicrous to me. I wouldn’t mind a general anesthesia.
> It’s too bad Mitch can’t be the pregnant one.
> Oh my God, he’d love that.
CHAPTER 57
WITH EVERYONE TALKING about New Year’s, Christmas came like an afterthought.
Lincoln had to work on Christmas Eve. “Someone has to work,” Greg said, “and it isn’t going to be me. I rented a Santa suit.”
It didn’t really matter. Eve was spending Christmas with Jake’s family in Colorado, and Lincoln’s mother wasn’t big on Christmas “or any of the Judeo-Christian holidays.”
Lincoln worked Christmas Eve, then went out for dinner with a bunch of the copy editors. There was a casino across the river with a twenty-four-hour buffet. “With crab legs tonight,” Chuck said, “on account of Christ’s birth.” Miniature Emilie came along. Lincoln could tell she was watching him, but he tried not to encourage her. He didn’t want to betray Beth. They wouldn’t let you ride Splash Mountain, he thought.
He spent Christmas Day with his mom, eating fresh gingerbread cookies and watching Jimmy Durante movies on public television.
WHEN HE CAME downstairs the next morning, his mother was on the telephone, talking about butter.
“Pfft,” she said, “it’s real food. Real food isn’t bad for you. It’s everything else that’s killing us. The dyes. The pesticides. The preservatives. Margarine.” His mother had a special disdain for margarine. Finding out that a family kept margarine in the butter dish was like finding out their pets weren’t house-trained. If margarine was such a good idea, she said, why didn’t God give it to us? Why didn’t He promise the Israelites to lead them into the land of margarine and honey? The Japanese don’t eat margarine, she said. The Scandinavians don’t eat margarine. “My parents were healthy as horses,” she told whoever was on the phone, “and they drank cream right off the top of the bucket.”
Lincoln grabbed the last gingerbread cookie, and went into the living room. Eve had given their mom a DVD player for Christmas, and he’d promised to hook it up. He thought he had it working—they didn’t have any DVDs to test it—when his mom walked into the living room.
“Well,” she said, slowly sitting down on the couch.
“What’s up?” he asked. He could tell she wanted him to.
“Well … ,” she said, “I just got off the phone with a woman named Doris.”
Lincoln quickly looked up from the floor. His mother was already looking down at him like she’d just confronted him with damning criminal evidence. Like it was clear he’d done it with the candlestick in the conservatory, and she had the candlestick to prove it.
“She acted as if I should recognize her name,” his mother said. “She couldn’t stop thanking me.”
Lincoln felt his face fall. Why would Doris call him at home? “I can explain,” he said.
“Doris already did,” his mother said. He couldn’t tell whether she was angry. “She said you share your dinner with her almost every night.”
“Well,” he said carefully, “that’s true.”
“I know that it’s true. The woman knows everything that’s come out of my kitchen for the past month. She wants the recipe for your grandmother’s salmon patties.”
“I’m sorry,” Lincoln said. “I couldn’t help myself. You should see what she brings for dinner—turkey loaf on Wonder bread every single night—and you always send me with such a feast. I felt guilty eating in front of her.”
“I don’t mind that you share,” his mother said. “I just don’t know why you wouldn’t tell me that you were doing it, that you were giving my food to …a stranger …”
She looked at him through narrowed eyes. “I wondered how you were eating so much and still losing weight. I thought you might be taking steroids.”
“I’m not taking steroids, Mom.” That made him laugh.
And that made her laugh.
“So that’s all it is?” she asked. There was something in her voice still. Worry.
“What do you mean?”
“You just feel sorry for her?”
“Well,” Lincoln said. He could hardly tell his mom that he ate dinner with Doris to up his chances of running into a girl he’d never met. “I guess we’re friends. Doris is actually pretty funny. Not always intentionally …”
His mother took a deep breath, like she was steadying herself. Lincoln’s voice trailed off.
“Oh, Mom, no. It’s not like that. It could not be more not like that. Mom. God.”
She put her hand on her forehead and exhaled.
“Why are you always bracing for me to tell you something weird?” he asked.
“What am I supposed to think when I hear that you eat dinner with the same woman every night? And it wouldn’t be that weird, you know, a number of my friends enjoy the company of younger men.”
“Mom.”
“Are you sure that Doris understands your intentions?”
“Yes.” Now his forehead was in his hands.
“You always were too generous,” she said, resting her hand on his head. “Remember when you dropped your action figures in the Salvation Army kettle?” He remembered. Snaggletooth and Luke Skywalker, X-Wing pilot. It had been an impulse. He’d ended up crying himself to sleep that night when he understood the repercussions.
She pushed his hair to the side, off his forehead, and held it for a moment.
“Do you feel like waffles?” she asked abruptly, standing up. “I’ve already made the batter. Oh, and don’t eat the rest of the lamb. I told Doris you’d bring her a chop …”
“Is that why she called?” he asked. “To thank you?”
“Oh no,” his mother said, talking more loudly as she walked into the kitchen, “she called for you. She’s moving—did you know she’s moving? She said the movers showed up for her furniture and they were throwing things around like the Samsonite gorilla. She didn’t trust them with her grandmother’s curio cabinet, and I don’t blame her. I offered to send you right over—you’ve got a strong, young back—but she said it could wait a few days. What do you think, whipped cream on waffles or maple syrup? Or both? We’ve got both.”
“Both,” Lincoln said. He followed her into the kitchen, smiling, but dizzy. Even when he and his mother were on the same page, Lincoln felt like he was just keeping up.
CHAPTER 58
EVERYONE IN IT stayed late that week, even the people who weren’t directly helping with the code patch. Greg was racked with anxiety. He was sure that the Y2K kids were grifting him. He told Lincoln that his doctor had written him a prescription for Paxil. Lincoln kept watching the International Strike Force for signs of fear or evasion. But they just sat in the corner, staring at screens full of code, calmly punching keys and drinking Mountain Dew.