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  “Yeah, you’re right,” Kate said. “And I think maybe I just wanted you to tell me something I already knew was true. And I do like him. I guess…” She sighed again. “I want to make sure that I think I like him because I like him, not because I’m guilting myself into liking him. I don’t want to do it so I can pat myself on the back for being”—she raised her hands to trace scare quotes in the air—“conscious.”

  “Kate, for real—if this is the worst problem you have, you’re having a good run right now.”

  Kate gasped. “Oh, Rebecca, I didn’t—”

  “That didn’t come out right. The worst problem you have with Carson, I meant to say.”

  “I still didn’t—”

  “I know.”

  “I’ve been doing all the talking.”

  “Of course you have!” Rebecca forced a teasing smile.

  “You’re great, Becca,” Kate said, reaching out and clasping her hand.

  “You, too,” said Rebecca.

  For a moment, not knowing how to transition into a lighter conversation topic, Rebecca and Kate both looked at the table’s touchscreen, which was displaying a portly illustration of a chef with a thick black mustache, joyously flinging an expanding disc of pizza dough into the air. But suddenly, the image disappeared, replaced with the presidential seal on a field of navy blue.

  The volume of conversation in the restaurant quickly fell to a murmur.

  The medallion around the wandering boy’s neck continued to declare that his parents were too far away. At the table with the rest of the boy’s family, the father stopped poking at his phone, staring at it with confusion; then he tapped it gently against the table’s edge a couple of times, as if there were a component inside that needed to be joggled to get it to work again.

  The President’s face appeared on the touchscreen in front of Rebecca, staring blindly up out of the table. From Rebecca’s point of view his head was upside down. “Kathryn Mullen!” the President said. “Hello!”

  “Hello, Mr. President,” Kate said as the diners at other tables greeted their touchscreens in unison.

  “Kathryn, I just wanted to take a little time out to say hi. It’s good to see”—the image of the President stuttered slightly—“a mother and daughter having dinner together out on the town!”

  Rebecca looked up at Kate and mouthed: Mother and daughter? Kate silently pointed at Rebecca’s glass of water. Oh: that was it. Kate’s drinks on the bill would have alcohol and Rebecca’s wouldn’t—it was a fair guess that one of them was underage, and a party of mother and daughter was the fairest guess from there. (Though what gave him the idea that they were both female? Cameras concealed in the ceiling? Sensors in the seats that could detect your gender based on the shape of your butt? Maybe only women ordered penne pasta with cream sauce?)

  “These are times of austerity,” the President said. “It’s important to keep up those female bonding rituals.”

  “Of course,” Kate said.

  “Though I was just thinking.” The President narrowed his eyes conspiratorially. “We can’t be tightening our belts all the time, can we? This is still America. We can still have a little fun sometimes. And I was just cleaning the house and found some change under the couch cushions and I was thinking: why don’t you ladies let me treat you to dessert?”

  A cheer rose from the tables throughout the restaurant. “That would be lovely,” Kate said.

  “You two just go ahead and get anything you want. One dessert each. It’s on me. Have a good night.”

  The President’s face faded to black as the father at the table next to Rebecca went back to thumbing his phone.

  “I feel like the President should know that I go by Kate instead of Kathryn,” Kate said.

  “I feel like the President should know that I’m not your daughter and I’m pushing forty,” Rebecca said.

  “Did you vote for that guy?”

  “Yes, and I regret it now.”

  “You’ll change your mind once you have the crème brûlée.”

  “So what is Philip up to this evening?” Kate asked, sliding a fork into an obscenely large slice of chocolate cake.

  “Dad’s talking to him,” Rebecca replied after swallowing a spoonful of crème brûlée, which was pretty good, if a little too sugary. “It’s funny. Philip never wanted to go to a therapist or anything like that after what happened with Sean: I think partly because he thought that going to one was like admitting you were crazy or something. And he’s an atheist, but he’s happy to talk to a theologian, as long as Dad frames the conversation like it’s an argument. And after these little talks, Philip always looks like he has a lot less on his mind. So I’m happy to stay out of it. I don’t ask questions.”

  Nearby, the four-year-old boy was screaming his head off, yodeling long wordless wails of pure anguish. Rebecca could see what the problem was: while the other three people at the table had desserts in front of them—mother and father had both opted for the cake, while the baby had a bowl with a single scoop of slightly runny ice cream—the boy had none. Tears spurted from his eyes, and his cheeks were dotted with troubling arrangements of red and blue blotches. The kid was crying so hard that beads of sweat had broken out on his forehead. The bear’s face on the medallion around his neck wore an expression of abject panic, its eyes jittering from left to right as if it were frantically searching for an avenue of escape.

  “You know what happens when you have sweet things after six o’clock, Dyson,” the mother was saying. “The sugar wakes up the gremlins that live in your body, and they take control of you and make you get into mischief. But Chelsea is too young for gremlins. And Mommy and Daddy do not have gremlins: we killed the gremlins that lived inside us, long ago. So this is why we can have sweet things at night and you cannot. We’ll have something special for you when you get home. How about a glass of the special milk? The tasty two percent milk, not the skim milk.”

  Dyson took a deep breath, held it, and let it out with an ear-piercing holler.

  “You guys over there are parents of the year,” one of the drunken women shouted.

  Dyson’s mother looked up, her face gone incandescent with rage.

  “It might be time for us to get the check,” said Rebecca.

  “No: I’m not leaving this cake until I can’t eat another bite.” Kate scarfed down another forkful. “I’ll do some time at the gym tomorrow. Besides, Carson might appreciate an extra half pound here or there: somewhere nice to put his hand.”

  “So what have you guys been doing together? Other than, you know, hanging out, or whatever you want to call it.”

  “Rebecca.”

  “Just playing.”

  “Well—he made dinner a couple of times. And he’s a pretty good cook! By which I mean he’s really good at following directions. His kitchen looks more like a chemistry lab than, like, a kitchen. I just turn the oven on to whatever and cook whatever it is until it looks right. But he’s got, like, a centrifuge! And this set of hardcore cookbooks in its own Lucite case—he’s super careful not to spill anything on them. But the stuff he puts on a plate is to die for. I could get used to that.

  “And he wants to bring me out to the lab to show me what he’s working on.”

  “Ha! You’re meeting the family.”

  “Stop it.”

  “I’m serious! When Philip and I were going out, the day I came to the lab was a big deal. Though he tried to pretend it wasn’t. He got all haughty about it.” Rebecca pulled her face into an exaggerated frown. “You’re going to need a basic understanding of my work if we are to be serious about seeing each other romantically. You know how he can get when he wants to.”

  “But he just wanted to show off his hot new girlfriend.”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Well, I’m looking forward to seeing the time machine I’ve heard so much about.”

  “Kate, whatever you do, please do not call it a time machine when you go over there. Philip will be livid. H
e will absolutely lose his—”

  “What the—”

  While Rebecca and Kate had been talking, dessert-deprived young Dyson had left his chair, stealthily sneaking up behind Kate’s. He’d sprung up beside her, plunged a chubby hand directly into her half-eaten slice of chocolate cake, ripped out a hunk of it, and shoved it straight into his mouth.

  His mother was right behind him. “Dyson!” she shouted. “The gremlins! The gremlins! Goddamn it!”

  “That, right there?” Rebecca pointed at the mutilated cake. “That was worth sticking around for.”

  “I’m so sorry,” Dyson’s mother said, wrestling with the boy, who had frosting smeared all over his mouth. “His terrible twos have been going on for three years now.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Kate said, looking at the woman placidly, as if this sort of thing happened all the time. Rebecca had seen this before: Kate had this way of being able to chill people out just by handling them the right way. She had a face for it: she could just look at someone and calm her down.

  Dyson’s mother staggered as the keening boy clasped her legs. “Can I get you—”

  “Don’t worry about it!” Kate repeated, her voice full of bonhomie. “In fact, let me—” She held an index finger in the air: Hold it. Then she removed her purse from where it had been hanging by its strap on the back of her chair and began to go through it. “I carry these little candies with me, for when I get a craving,” she said. “They’re sugar-free!” She looked the mother directly in the eye. “May I give one to Dyson?”

  Still holding on to his mother’s legs, Dyson turned to look at Kate, sniffling back a string of snot.

  “Sugar-free,” Dyson’s mother said suspiciously.

  “Yeah! I get them at this place online. Do you have any idea how hard it is to find stuff like this?”

  “They put sugar in everything. They squirt it all over cereal and green beans and hamburger buns. Kids today grow up not knowing what real food tastes like.”

  “I know exactly what you mean,” Kate said. “Hey, Dyson,” she whispered loudly, proffering the piece of hard candy in its nondescript brown wrapper. “This is for you.”

  Quickly, Dyson snatched the candy off Kate’s palm, unwrapped it, and popped it into his mouth. “Ha!” he said to his mother, then left her to climb back into his chair, as polite as could be.

  “You’re a very nice lady,” Dyson’s mother said.

  “Oh, gosh, thanks,” Kate replied with a smile.

  On the way out to the parking lot after they’d settled the bill, Rebecca said, “I didn’t know you had it in you. You’re like some kind of baby whisperer.”

  Kate laughed. “You know that candy wasn’t sugar-free,” she said. “Also, it had a coffee bean in the middle. Watch for that mother doing a perp walk on tomorrow morning’s news.”

  “Kate! That’s horrible!”

  Kate paused and thought about it. “Yeah!”

  They shared a good long belly laugh over that, and then as Kate caught her breath she said, “Okay. Seriously. Are you okay?”

  “Yeah,” Rebecca said. “I’m okay. I’m good.”

  On Route 1 the lane in front of Rebecca was empty for fifty yards: her car’s red license plate marked it as a vehicle under exclusively manual control, and so the automatics with their green plates gave it a wide berth. Strangely, the drivers of automatic cars could be just as rude as if they’d actually had to steer them; there were occasional beeps behind her, and as one car pulled by on her right, its driver rolled down his window, stuck both fists out of it with their middle fingers extended, and yelled, “Learn to drive, you stupid bi—,” the wind snatching the last word out of his mouth as he passed.

  But so what, Rebecca thought. So what. If other people wanted to get angry about something that didn’t matter, about ten seconds of inconvenience, then let them get angry. She felt good, really good, and she had a clear road in front of her, all the way home.

  5

  BLACKOUT SEASON

  In the midst of what Rebecca had thought of, thirteen years ago, as her “blackout season,” there had been no such clear roads ahead. But at the time, when she’d been deep in it, that hadn’t seemed so bad: such was the season’s peculiar character. The blackout season made you feel that it was perfectly fine to be in darkness for a while; that it was good to sit and wait for the light and the path to reveal themselves in their own time. It was good to sit still, to close your eyes, and wait, and listen—

  “Rebecca. Have you heard a word I’ve said?”

  “Yeah! You were talking about—” She recalled half of what she remembered him saying and took a guess. “Thoreau.”

  “Emerson,” her father said. “Close enough.”

  Woody took a drink of whisky from his glass (the Scotch Ardbeg, the glass Waterford crystal—in this area he was a stickler for niceties and details) and continued to pace the living room floor in front of Rebecca, who was seated in a recliner with her laptop, idly flicking back and forth between three different browser windows, each displaying a feed from a different social network. There wasn’t much going on this Thursday afternoon: mostly posts and reposts and re-reposts of others’ status updates, and videos of pets and photos of toddlers. Minor slights were rendered as major tragedies (“out of Bloomin Onion at Outback FML!!!”); impending off-the-cuff social engagements were treated as reunions with long-lost relatives (“Can’t wait to GET MY DRINK ON w/Kimmy and Jules tonite!!”). But still, it was hard not to immerse yourself in that constant drip-feed of information without feeling that something was going on, something nebulous and hard to state, but nonetheless deeply profound. Every page refresh promised the little dopamine kick that came from the shock of the new. Meanwhile, Dad was trying to hammer out the superstructure of Sunday’s sermon, but if she got out of bed on time she’d just hear it then. (Though if you were going to be a preacher’s daughter, you might as well reap the benefit of being a Unitarian preacher’s daughter, and sleep in now and again.)

  Woody liked to link the sacred to the secular whenever he could; he also had a strong distaste for prosperity theology, or any sort of optimistic theology in general, and felt that he wasn’t properly doing his job unless, about two-thirds of the way through the message, he didn’t sense a little disquiet in the congregation, a dash of despair. (“The name-it-and-claim-it crowd has plenty of venues,” he’d say. “Someone has to be a bulwark against the tide.”) Lately he’d been thinking on the Transcendentalists. “Here’s the thing about Emerson. You look at those early essays and addresses, and time after time you see this distrust of books and libraries. True wisdom lives in nature; that’s where you go for the hot new information. Budding branch and newborn butterfly and all that. While books are dead and static. But how do you get Emerson’s message? Through a—Rebecca. For fifteen points, and the lead.”

  “Um. Book.”

  “Exactly. It’s a paradox. It is, how do the kids say it, meta? And does he ever address the paradox? As far as I know he just leaves it on the table. Distrust all texts, he says, including this one. Which you could say is also the message of Ecclesiastes. Now there’s the hook. You can never have enough of Ecclesiastes. Nothing like Ecclesiastes to put a real pall on proceedings. A quick glimpse into a godless world that’s sure to chill the spine. Full of doubt and contradiction. I could lead from there into the Emerson, and maybe move from there into a charming personal anecdote about how my adult daughter Rebecca spends way too much time online and way too little out in the world. Among nature.”

  “This is nature,” Rebecca said. “It’s just, you know, electronic.”

  “What I’m saying, Rebecca,” Woody said with just a touch of fire and brimstone, “is that in general, you could stand to be a little more Emersonian—hint: self-reliant—and a little less sitting-around-the-house-and-surfing-the-net-all-day-ish.”

  “Time for this week’s lecture from Dad. FML,” Rebecca typed quickly, updating her status and closing her laptop. />
  “I admit I can see the pleasure in living one’s life as the heroine of a film loosely based on a Jane Austen novel, doing little or nothing except waiting for a suitable husband. But Austen’s times died with Austen, and even she was joking. College was more than a finishing school for you, my dear. You’ve been out for three years now. It’s time, as the kids say, to get paid.”

  “Nine point five percent,” Rebecca responded; the beats of this conversation were familiar enough that she didn’t have to spell out to her father that this was New Jersey’s present unemployment rate.

  “Nine point five is for the people who—”

  “Plus the ones who aren’t counted in the stats anymore because they’ve been out of work for ninety-nine weeks. Call it twenty percent to be conservative.”

  “Twenty percent of the population who could stand a little Emerson in their lives. You know what he was about? Other than the business with the trees and the butterflies? Being a doer. Didn’t matter what everyone else was doing with their time. You had a duty not to squander your human potential. You were supposed to go out and shape the world in your image. Just—”

  “I have a bachelor’s degree in English. I can recommend books for people to read if they tell me the kind of thing they like. And Amazon does that for free.”

  “—just get out there and do. You know? When you’re here you spend, what, five, six hours a day on that laptop?”

  “Looking for jobs. And I am out there. Just in a different way.”