? ? ?
When Alice closed her eyes and pictured her father, her father as he would live in perpetuity in her mind, it was an image of Leonard sitting at their round kitchen table on Pomander Walk. There were a few streets like it in the city: Patchin Place and Milligan Place in the West Village, and a few in Brooklyn, near where Alice lived, but Pomander Walk was different. Most mews streets were carriage houses, or had been built as housing for some grand building being constructed nearby, and were now expensive but still dollhouse-sized, for the rich people who wanted exclusivity and quaintness more than they wanted storage space. Pomander was a dash straight through the middle of the block, cutting from 94th to 95th Street in between Broadway and West End. It had been built by a hotel developer in 1921, and what Leonard had always loved about it was this: it was a real street inspired by a novel-turned-play about a small town in England. It was a facsimile of a facsimile, a real version of a fictional place, with two rows of tiny houses that looked straight out of “Hansel and Gretel,” locked behind a gate.
The houses were small, two stories high each, and most were split into two floor-through apartments. Tiny, well-tended garden patches sat in front of each door, and at the 95th Street end, a guardhouse no bigger than a phone booth held shared equipment—snow shovels and cobwebs and the occasional cockroach doing the backstroke. When Alice was a child, Reggie, the superintendent, had told her that Humphrey Bogart had once lived on Pomander, and his private security guard had used the guardhouse as his post, but she didn’t know if it was true. What Alice did know was that Pomander Walk was a special place, and that even though the front windows were only about ten feet from their across-the-walk neighbors and their back windows faced their neighbors in the huge apartment buildings next door, it felt like their own private universe.
The scene was always exactly the same: Leonard at the kitchen table; the floor lamp on behind him; a book or three on the table in front of him; a glass of water, and then a glass of something else, sweating from the ice inside; a legal pad; a pen. During the day, Leonard watched soap operas, he walked in Central Park, he walked in Riverside Park, he took trips to the post office and to Fairway, he went to City Diner on Broadway and 90th Street, he talked to friends on the telephone. At night, though, Leonard sat at the kitchen table and worked. Alice tried to put herself inside the frame, to watch herself walk through the door, drop her bag on the floor, and settle into the chair opposite her father. What had she said to him after school? Had they talked about homework? Had they talked about movies, about television programs? About answers they knew on Jeopardy!? Alice knew they had, but her memories were all pictures without sound.
* * *
? ? ?
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 loved Time 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. The Time Brothers characters made good costumes—not as snug as a spandex Star Trek uniform, 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 the New York Times crossword 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 the Time Brothers brothers 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 a Top Chef chef. 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.”