“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.
“No problem,” Lincoln messaged back. “I hope he feels better. Get some rest.”