He trashed the files and went home.

“YOU DON’T HAVE to pack me a lunch,” Lincoln told his mother. Even though he liked it when she did.

He’d practically given up fast food since he moved back home. There was always something baking in his mother’s kitchen, or frying or simmering or cooling on a plate. She was always pushing Pyrex containers into his hands on his way out the door.

“I’m not packing you lunch,” she said. “I’m packing you dinner.”

“But you don’t have to,” he said. He didn’t mind living with his mother, but there are degrees of living with your mother. And he was pretty sure that letting her cook every meal for him was too many degrees. She’d started planning her days around feeding him.

“I don’t have to do anything,” she said, handing him a grocery bag with a heavy glass dish clinking inside.

“What’d you make?” he asked. It smelled like cinnamon.

“Tandoori chicken. I think. I mean, I don’t have a tandoori or a tandoor, one of those ovens, and I didn’t have enough yogurt, they use yogurt, don’t you think? I used sour cream. And paprika. Maybe it’s chicken paprikash …I know I don’t have to make you dinner, you know. I want to. I feel better when you eat—when you eat real food, not something that comes in a wrapper. I’m already so worried about you, the way you don’t sleep, and you’re never in the sun …”

“I sleep, Mom.”

“During the day. We’re meant to be awake with the sun, soaking up vitamin D, and sleeping at night, in the dark. When you were a little boy, I wouldn’t even let you sleep with a night-light, do you remember? It interferes with melatonin production.”

“Okay,” he said. He couldn’t think of a time he’d argued with her and won.

“Okay, what does ‘okay’ mean?”

“It means, okay, I hear you.”

“Oh. Well. Then that doesn’t mean anything at all. Take the chicken, would you? Eat it?”

“I will.” He held the bag against his chest and smiled. He tried to look like somebody she didn’t need to worry about so much. “Of course I will,” he said. “Thank you.”

GREG WAS WAITING for Lincoln when he walked into the IT office. It was always a few degrees colder in there, for the servers. You’d think that would be nice. Refreshing. But it was more of a clammy than a cool.

“Hey, Senator,” Greg said, “I got to thinking about what you were saying a few days ago, you know, about not having enough to do. So I found you something.”

“Great,” Lincoln said, meaning it.

“You can start archiving and compressing all the user-stored files from the last six months or so,”

Greg said, clearly thinking this was an inspired idea.

Lincoln wasn’t so sure.

“Why would you want me to do that?” he said. “It’s a waste of time.”

“I thought that’s what you were looking for.”

“I was looking for …Well, I wasn’t looking for anything. I just felt bad getting paid to do nothing.”

“And now you don’t have to feel bad,” Greg said. “I just gave you something to do.”

“Yeah, but archiving and compressing …That could take years. And it doesn’t matter.”

Greg put on his Windbreaker and gathered up a stack of folders. He was leaving early to take his kid to the orthodontist. “There’s no pleasing you, is there, Lincoln? This is why you don’t have a woman.”

How does he know I don’t have a woman, Lincoln wondered.

He spent the rest of the night archiving and compressing files, just to spite Greg. (Even though Greg would never notice that the work was done, let alone that it was done spitefully.) Lincoln archived and compressed and thought hard about quitting. He might have walked out, there and then, if anyone had been in the IT office to accept his resignation.

It was almost ten o’clock when he remembered his mother’s tandoori chicken.

The container had tilted open in its paper bag, and there was a pool of bright orange sauce on the carpet under his desk. The girl who sat there during the day, Kristi, would be angry. She’d already left Lincoln a Post-it note asking him to stop eating at her workstation. She said he was getting crumbs in her keyboard.

Lincoln took what was left of the chicken up to the second-floor break room. Almost nobody used the break room at night—the copy editors ate at their desks—but it was still livelier than the empty information technology office. He liked all the vending machines, and sometimes his break would overlap with the janitors’. Not tonight. Tonight, the room was empty.

For once, Lincoln was glad to be alone. He grabbed a plastic fork and started eating his chicken at a table in the corner. He didn’t bother heating it up.

Two people walked into the break room then, a man and a woman. They were arguing about something. Amicably. “Give our readers some credit,” the woman said, wagging a rolled-up Sports section at the man and leaning against the coffee machine. “I can’t,” he said. “I’ve met too many of them.” The man was wearing a dingy white shirt and a thick brown tie. He looked like he hadn’t changed his clothes or gotten a good night’s sleep since the Carter presidency. The woman was younger. She had bright eyes and broad shoulders and hair that fell to the middle of her back. She was too pretty to look at.

They were all too pretty to look at. He couldn’t remember the last time he had looked a woman in the eyes. A woman who wasn’t his mother. Or his sister, Eve.

If he didn’t look, he didn’t risk accidental eye contact. He hated that feeling—at the bank, in elevators—when you inadvertently catch someone’s eye, and she feels compelled to show you she’s not interested. They did that sometimes, looked away pointedly before you even realized you were looking at them. Lincoln had apologized to a woman once when their eyes had met, unintentionally, over a gas pump. She’d pretended not to hear him and looked away.

“If you don’t get a date,” Eve kept threatening, “I’m going to start fixing you up with nice, Lutheran girls. Hard-core Lutherans. Missouri Synod.”

“You wouldn’t,” he told her. “If any of your church friends met Mom, it would totally ruin your rep.

Nobody would want to sit next to you at adult Bible study.”

The woman in the break room laughed and shook her head. “You’re being perverse,” she said. She was so preoccupied with her argument, it almost felt safe to watch her. She was wearing faded jeans and a soft green jacket that inched up when she bent over to get her coffee. There were freckles on the small of her back. Lincoln looked away.

“There’s nothing wrong with you, Lincoln,” his sister would tell him. “You’ve been on dates.

You’ve had a girlfriend. There is nothing about you that is inherently un-dateable.”

“Is this supposed to be a pep talk? Because all I’m hearing is ‘inherently un-dateable.’”

Lincoln had been on dates. He’d had a girlfriend. He’d seen the small of a woman’s back before.

He’d stood at concerts and football games and basement parties with his hand on a woman’s back, on Sam’s back, with his fingers sliding inside her sweater. He’d felt like he was getting away with some secret intimacy, touching her like that when no one was paying attention.

Lincoln wasn’t inherently un-dateable. He’d gone on a date three years ago. A friend’s sister had needed a date to a wedding. She’d danced all night with one of the groomsmen, who turned out to be her second cousin, while Lincoln ate exactly thirteen cream cheese mints.

He wasn’t scared, exactly, to start dating again. He just couldn’t visualize it. He could imagine himself a year in, at the comfortable place, the hand-at-the-small-of-the-back place. But the meeting, the making a girl like him …He was useless at all that.

“I don’t believe that,” Eve said. “You met Sam. You made her fall in love with you.”

He hadn’t, actually. He hadn’t even noticed Sam before she started poking him in the shoulder during tenth-grade world geography. “You have very nice posture,” she’d said. “Did you know you have a mole on the back of your neck?

“I spend a lot of time looking at the back of your neck,” she said. “I could probably identify your body if there was ever an accident. As long as your neck wasn’t hopelessly disfigured.”

It made him blush. The next day, she told him that he smelled like peaches. She was loud. And funny. (But not as funny as loud.) And it was nothing for her to look you straight in the eye—in front of people—and say, “No, really, Lincoln, you smell like peaches.” And she would laugh, and he would blush.

She liked embarrassing him. She liked that she could.

When she asked him to Homecoming, he thought that it might be a joke, that she’d spend the night teasing him in front of her friends. But he said yes anyway. And she didn’t.

Sam was different when they were alone. She was quiet—well, quieter—and he could tell her anything, even things that mattered. She liked to talk about things that mattered. She was wholehearted, and fierce.

He hadn’t made Sam fall in love with him. She just did.

And he’d loved her back.

Lincoln looked up at the coffee machine. The man in the rumpled shirt and the girl with the freckles were gone.

CHAPTER 7

From: Beth Fremont

To: Jennifer Scribner-Snyder

Sent: Mon, 08/30/1999 11:24 AM

Subject: Who looks good in a strapless dress?

Not just strapless. A strapless sheath. Who can pull that off?

<<Jennifer to Beth>> Um, Joan Collins. Lynda Carter. Shania Twain …

<<Beth to Jennifer>>

1. Do you only watch the Lifetime Network? Or do you also occasionally watch Hollywood Squares?

2. Even those lovely ladies would look hippy standing next to my sister’s bridesmaids. They’re all 20 years old and have “I might not be throwing up in the Tri-Delt bathroom after dinner, but my roommate is, and I like to borrow her jeans” hips.

Maybe I could have gotten away with a strapless sheath once …for like one day in 1989, but that day is long gone.

<<Jennifer to Beth>> Ten years gone.

<<Beth to Jennifer>> Thanks for that. Oh, and did I tell you that the wedding might have a theme?

Kiley’s fiancé wants to do something with the New Millennium.

<<Jennifer to Beth>> What does that even mean?

<<Beth to Jennifer>> Damned if I know. I wish it meant that I could wear a silver jumpsuit.

<<Jennifer to Beth>> Maybe your sister would let you wear a wrap or a sweater or something so that you won’t feel so exposed.

<<Beth to Jennifer>> That’s a good idea. Maybe I could talk Gwen into wearing one, too, so that I’m not the only one.

<<Jennifer to Beth>> Your sister Gwen is in the wedding? She’s not a teeny-tiny Tri-Delt. You won’t be the only life-size bridesmaid.

<<Beth to Jennifer>> No, you’re right. You’re right. I’m not sure why I’m getting so upset about this. This dress, this wedding. I really am happy for Kiley. And for you and every other happily married lady.

Except for that I’m not happy for you. I kind of want you all to drop dead. When Kiley showed me her ring—platinum, 1.4 carats—I really wanted to say something mean about it. Who really needs a ring that big? I ask you. It was rings that big that made our grandmothers think Elizabeth Taylor was a whore.

And then I actually did say something mean, quite a few some-things mean.

We were at the bridal shop for our first fitting (yes, already), and I said that sage green is the color of dirty aquarium water. And that polyester crepe smells like B.O. even before you put it on.

And when she told us her wedding song—of course, they’ve already picked their wedding song, and of course, it’s “What a Wonderful World” by Louis Armstrong—I said that choosing that song is the sonic equivalent of buying picture frames and never replacing the photos of the models.

<<Jennifer to Beth>> Ouch. Are you still in the wedding?

<<Beth to Jennifer>> I’m still the maid of honor.

Nobody was listening to me snipe. Kiley was trying on veils, and the other bridesmaids were too busy counting each other’s ribs to pay attention.

I felt like such a lousy human being when I left that bridal shop. I felt bad for making a scene. I felt mad that no one had noticed. I felt like the sort of person who would set something on fire just to get attention. Which suddenly seemed like a really good idea …

Setting something on fire. Something made of polyester crepe.

I couldn’t torch Kiley’s dress—not yet, I won’t even get it for 10 to 12 weeks—but I have a whole closet full of dead dresses. Prom dresses. Bridesmaid dresses. I was all prepared to scoop them up in big fluffy armfuls and throw them into the Dumpster outside my building. I was going to light a cigarette in their flames, like I was the cool girl in Heathers …

But I couldn’t. Because I’m not that girl. I’m not the Winona Ryder character in any movie. Jo from Little Women, just for example, never would have started laying all those dresses out on her bed and trying them on, one by one …

Including the off-the-shoulder number I wore to my brother’s wedding 12 years ago. It’s teal (that was 1987’s sage green) with puffy sleeves and peach rosettes at the waist. Of course it was too tight, and of course it wouldn’t zip—because I’m not 16 anymore. That’s when it hit me— I’m not 16 anymore.