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CHAPTER 20

SOMETIME AFTER MIDNIGHT
, Lincoln walked up to the newsroom. It was mostly empty. There were a few nightside copy editors left, poring over the next morning’s newspaper. Someone was sitting at the city desk, listening to a crackling police scanner and working on tomorrow’s crossword.

Lincoln walked to the other side of the long room, where he assumed the Entertainment staff worked. Back there, the cubicles were full of movie posters, concert flyers, promotional photos and toys.

He stopped at a printer and opened it, just to look like he had something to do. Which desk was he looking for? Maybe the one with the R.E.M. stickers. Probably not the one with the stuffed Bart Simpson and half a dozen fully poseable
Alien
action figures …but maybe. Maybe. Would Beth have a Page-a-Day cat calendar? A potted plant? A Sandman poster? A Marilyn Manson press pass?

A Sandman poster.

He looked back at the copy desk. He could hardly see the copy editors from here, which meant they could hardly see him. He walked over to Beth’s cubicle, to what he thought was her cubicle.

A Sandman poster. A
Rushmore
poster. A three-year-old flyer for Sacajawea at Sokol Hall. A dictionary. A French dictionary. Three books by Leonard Maltin. A high school journalism award. Empty coffee cups. Starburst wrappers. Photographs.

He sat at her desk and lamely started to take apart her computer mouse.

Photographs. One was a concert photograph, a guy playing guitar. Obviously her boyfriend, Chris. In another frame, the same guy sat on a beach. In another, he wore a suit. He looked like a rock star even without the guitar. Slender and slouched over. Never quite smiling. Always looking past the camera. Shaggy. Roguish. Handsome.

There were family pictures, too, of angelic dark-haired babies and nice-looking, well-dressed adults—but none of them seemed to be Beth. They weren’t the right age, or they were standing with what were clearly husbands or children.

Lincoln went back to looking at the boyfriend. Looking at his not-quite smile and his sharp cheekbones. At his long, twisting waist. He looked like he had a get-out-of-jail-free card in his back pocket. If you looked like that, a woman would forgive you. She would expect to have to forgive you now and then.

Lincoln set the mouse down and walked back to the information technology office. Lumbered back. He could see his dim reflection in the darkened office windows along the hall. He felt heavy and plain. Lumpy. Thick. Gray.

He shouldn’t have done that. What he’d just done. Gone to her desk.

It felt wrong, like he’d crossed a line.

Beth was funny. She was smart. She was interesting. And she had the sort of job that made someone more interesting. The sort of job a woman would have in a movie, a romantic comedy starring John Cusack.

He’d wanted to see what she looked like. He’d wanted to see where she sat when she wrote the things he read.

He was glad he hadn’t found a picture of her. It had been enough to see the pictures of people she loved. To see how he didn’t fit into them.

“
I THOUGHT THAT
if I moved back home,” Lincoln said to Eve when she called the next day, “that I’d get a life.”

“Are you retarded?”

“I thought you stopped saying ‘retarded’ and ‘gay’ so that your kids wouldn’t pick it up.”

“I can’t help it. That’s how retarded you sound right now. Why would you think that? And why would you refer to it as moving
back
home? You never moved out.”

“Yes, I did. I left for college ten years ago.”

“And you came back every summer.”

“Not every summer. There were summers when I took classes.”

“Whatever,” she said. “How could you think that moving in with your mother full-time would help you get a life?”

“Because it meant that I was finally done with school. That’s when all my friends got lives, after they graduated. That’s when they got jobs and got married.”

“Okay …”

“I think I missed my window,” he said.

“What window?”

“My get-a-life window. I think I was supposed to figure all this stuff out somewhere between twenty-two and twenty-six, and now it’s too late.”

“It’s not too late,” she said. “You are getting a life. You’ve got a job, you’re saving up to move out. You’re meeting people. You went to a bar …”

“And that was a disaster. Actually, everything has been a disaster since I quit school.”

“You didn’t quit school,” she said. He could hear her rolling her eyes. “You finished your master’s degree. Another master’s degree.”

“Everything has been a disaster since I decided my life as it was wasn’t good enough.”

“It
wasn’t
good enough,” she said.

“It was good enough for me.”

“Then why have you been trying so hard to change it?”

THAT SATURDAY NIGHT
, Lincoln played Dungeons & Dragons for the first time in a month.

Christine grinned when she saw him at the door.

“Lincoln, hey!” Christine was short and round with rumpled blond hair. She was carrying a baby in some sort of sling, and when she hugged Lincoln, the baby was smushed between them.

“We thought we’d lost you to the big city,” Dave said, rounding the corner.

“You did,” Lincoln said. “I found a group of younger, better-looking gamers.”

“We all knew that would happen eventually,” Dave said, clapping Lincoln on the back and leading him into house. “This game has gotten entirely too chaotic-evil without you. We tried to kill off your character last week to punish you for abandoning us, but Christine wouldn’t let us, so we left you in a pit instead. Possibly a snake-filled pit. You’ll have to work that out with Larry, he’s the Dungeon Master this week.”

“We just started playing,” Christine said. “You should’ve called, we would’ve waited for you.”

“You should have called,” Troy said from the dining room table. “I wouldn’t have had to ride my bike twelve miles to get here.”

“Troy, I said I’d pick you up,” Larry said. Larry was a little older than the rest of them, in his early thirties, an Air Force captain with a family and some secret job involving artificial intelligence.

“Your car smells like juice boxes,” Troy said.

“Do you have any idea what you smell like?” Larry asked.

“It’s sandalwood,” Troy said.

“You smell like a Pier One store with body odor,” Lincoln said, finding his spot in the corner. They’d saved it for him. Dave handed him a slice of pizza.

“It’s a masculine scent,” Troy said.

“I didn’t say I didn’t like it,” Lincoln said. That made Rick laugh. Rick was pale and thin and never wore anything other than black. He even wore pieces of black cloth and leather tied around his wrists. If not for Rick, Lincoln would have been the Shy One in the group.

Lincoln looked around the table, wondering where that left him.

If Dave was the Intense One, and Christine was the Girl …And Larry was the Serious One (and the Intimidating One and the One Most Likely to Be on a Black Ops Team) …If Rick was the Shy One, and Troy was the Weird One, and Teddy, a surgical resident who looked like the dad in
Back to the Future
—Teddy might actually be the Nerdy One …

Then who was Lincoln?

All the adjectives that came to his head (lost, stunted, mother-living) brought him down.

Tonight it was enough to be one of them. To be someplace where he always had a spot at the table, where everybody already knew that he didn’t like olives on his pizza, and they always looked happy to see him.

When Lincoln realized he was rewriting the theme song to
Cheers
, he decided to stop thinking and just play.

THE GAME WENT
on for seven hours. Everyone made rescuing Lincoln’s character—a lawful-good dwarf named ’Smov the Ninekiller—the first order of business. They defeated a nefarious wind witch. They ordered more pizza. Dave and Christine’s three-year-old fell asleep on the floor, watching
Toy Story.

Lincoln stayed after the game ended and everyone else went home. Dave opened a window, and the three of them sat on couches, breathing cool, clean air and listening to Christine’s wind chimes.

“You know what we should do now?” Dave said, rubbing his 2:00 a.m. stubble.

“What?” Lincoln said.

“Axis and Allies.”

Christine threw a pillow at him. “God, no.”

Dave caught it. “Lincoln wants to play Axis and Allies. I can see it in his eyes …”

“I think Lincoln wants to tell us what he’s been doing with himself lately.” Christine smiled warmly at Lincoln. Everything about her was warm and soft and welcoming.

They’d kissed once, in college, in his dorm room, before Christine had started dating Dave. Lincoln had offered to help her study for a physics final. Christine didn’t need to take physics; she wanted to be an English teacher. But she told Lincoln that she didn’t want to live in a world she didn’t understand, that she didn’t want a faith-based relationship with things like centrifugal force and gravity. As she said it, she kicked off her sandals and sat Indian-style on his bed. She had long, wavy, wheaty hair that never looked brushed.

Christine told Lincoln that he explained everything so much better than her physics professor, a stern man with a Slavic accent who acted offended every time she asked a stupid question. Lincoln told her that her questions weren’t stupid, and she hugged him. That’s when he kissed her. It was like kissing a warm bath.

“That was nice,” Christine said when he pulled away. He couldn’t tell whether she wanted him to kiss her again. She was smiling. She looked happy, but that didn’t mean anything. She always looked happy …

“Do you feel ready for your test?” he asked.

“Could we go over torque one more time?”

“Sure,” he said, “yeah.” Christine smiled some more. They went back to studying, and she ended up getting a B on her physics final.

Sometimes, Lincoln wished that he would have kept kissing her that night. It would be so easy to love Christine, to be in love with her. You’d never raise your voice. She’d never be mean.

But he wasn’t jealous when she started dating Dave a few months later. Christine radiated happy when she was with Dave. And Dave, who could really, truly, be painfully intense sometimes—the kind of guy who leans in too far when he’s making a point, who might still be snippy with you two weeks after your D&D character had bested his in a swordfight—was loose and forgiving when Christine was around. Lincoln liked their messy-warm house, their messy-round kids, their living room with too many lamps and pillows, the way their voices softened when they talked to each other.

“I think,” Lincoln said, “if we started an Axis and Allies game right now, I’d fall asleep before Russia was done buying tanks.”

“Is that a yes?” Dave asked.

“That’s a no,” Christine said. “You should sleep here, Lincoln. You look too tired to drive.”

“Yeah, stay,” Dave said, “we’ll make blueberry pancakes for breakfast.”

Lincoln stayed. He slept on the couch, and when he woke up, he helped Christine make pancakes and argued with Dave about the plot of a fantasy novel they’d both read. After breakfast, they made him promise to come to next week’s game.

“We still have to catch up,” Christine said.

“Yeah,” Dave said. “You still haven’t told us about your job.”

IT WAS SUCH
a good weekend that Lincoln still felt cheerful and un-lonely when he got to work Monday night. He was feeling practically sunny when his sister called.

“Have you read any more of that parachute book?” she asked.

“No. It’s too intimidating.”

“What is?”

“The book,” he said. “The future.”

“So you’re done with the future?”

“I’m tightening my focus.”

“To what?”

“The near future,” he said. “I can handle the near future. Tonight, for example, I’m going to read for pleasure. Tomorrow, I’m going to have a beer with lunch. On Saturday, I’m going to play Dungeons & Dragons. And Sunday, I might go see a movie. That’s my plan.”

“That isn’t a plan,” she said.

“It is. It’s my plan. And I feel really good about it.”

“Those aren’t things you plan. You don’t plan to read or to have a beer with lunch. Those are things you do when you have a moment between planned events. Those are incidentals.”

“Not for me,” he said. “That’s my plan.”

“You’re backsliding.”

“Or maybe I’m frontsliding.”

“I can’t talk to you anymore,” Eve said. “Call me this weekend.”

“I’ll pencil you in.”

ALL THE Y2K
stuff was keeping Lincoln busier at work—he was helping with the coding and trying to keep track of Greg’s strike force—but he still had hours of free time every night. On Friday night, when he told himself how lucky he was to get paid to reread Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series, he mostly believed it.

Money and time, those were the two things that he always heard people complaining about, and he had plenty of both.

There wasn’t anything Lincoln wanted that he couldn’t afford. What did he really want, anyway? To buy new books when they came out in hardback. To not have to think about how much money was in his wallet when he was ordering dinner. Maybe new sneakers …And there wasn’t anything he wanted to do that he couldn’t make time for. What did he have to mope about, really? What more did he want?

Love, he could hear Eve saying. Purpose.

Love. Purpose.
Those
are the things that you can’t plan for. Those are the things that just happen. And what if they don’t happen? Do you spend your whole life pining for them? Waiting to be happy?

That night, Lincoln got an e-mail from Dave saying that Saturday’s D&D game was off. One of their kids had rotavirus, which Lincoln had never even heard of. It sounded awful. He pictured a virus with rotating blades and an engine. Dave said there’d been lots of vomiting, that they’d had to go to the emergency room, and Christine was scared to death.

“We’ll probably be on hiatus for the next couple weekends,” Dave had written.