“None taken,” Lincoln said.
“Are the computers going to fail?” one of the artists asked him, licking ketchup off her thumb. She asked it like she was hoping he’d say yes. Lincoln couldn’t remember her name, but she had all-over- the-place hair and big brown eyes. He didn’t like thinking about her with an X-Acto knife.
“I don’t think so,” Lincoln said. “It’s pretty simple coding, and we’ve got a crack team of international computer experts working on it.” He’d meant that to sound sarcastic, but it had come out pretty sincere.
“Are you talking about that Croatian kid who fixed the color printer?” Chuck asked.
“Somebody fixed the color printer?” Lincoln asked.
“I just know that I’m not taking the heat if the publisher can’t read his paper while he eats his soft- boiled egg on New Year’s morning,” Chuck said. “I’m going to have child support by then.”
Even Doris was worried about the Y2K bug.
She’d asked Lincoln that week if she should even bother coming to work on New Year’s Day. When the computers all stopped, she asked, would the vending machines be affected? Lincoln had told her he didn’t think that anything was going to stop. He’d offered her a slice of sweet potato pie.
“I think I might stay home that night all the same,” she said. “Stock up on the basics.” Lincoln imagined a refrigerator full of turkey sandwiches and closets full of Pepsi products.
“I haven’t had sweet potato pie like this since I was a little girl,” Doris said. “I need to write your mother a thank-you note.”
Lincoln’s mother couldn’t decide if the millennium problem was a good thing or a bad thing. She was pretty sure it was going to be chaos, but maybe, she said, falling back would do everyone a little good.
“I don’t need a global network,” she said. “I don’t need to need to have my produce airmailed in from other continents. We still have a hand-crank washing machine in the basement, you know. We’ll get by.”
Meanwhile, his sister had filled a room in her basement with canned goods. “It’s a win-win,” Eve said. “If everything’s okay, I don’t have to go to the grocery store for a year. If everything isn’t okay, Mom will have to come to my house and live off SpaghettiOs—and she’ll have to like it.”
Lincoln planned on working New Year’s Eve, with the rest of the IT office. But Justin and Dena wanted him to come to a big New Year’s Eve party at the Ranch Bowl. Sacajawea was headlining, and there was going to be champagne on tap. Justin was calling it “millennial debauchery.”
And Christine had called to invite him to a Rebirthday Party that night.
“You’re not calling it that, are you?”
“Don’t tease, Lincoln. New Year’s is my favorite holiday. And this is the biggest New Year’s ever.”
“But it’s a nothing holiday, Christine. It’s an odometer turning over.”
“People love to watch odometers turn over,” she said.
“It’s a number.”
“It’s not,” she said. “It’s a chance to wake up new.”
From: Beth Fremont
To: Jennifer Scribner-Snyder
Sent: Wed, 12/22/1999 11:36 AM
Subject: So …
How was your appointment?
<<Jennifer to Beth>> Bleah. I’ve already gained twice as much weight as I’m supposed to, even with all the throwing up. The baby was in the wrong position to hear the heartbeat, and Mitch wouldn’t stop asking the midwife questions. He wanted to know all about epidurals and episiotomies and something called “cervix ripening.” Doesn’t that sound vile? Now she’ll think we’re both crazy.
<<Beth to Jennifer>>
1. Why does your midwife think you’re crazy?
2. How does one know when one’s cervix is ripe? Do you thump it?
<<Jennifer to Beth>>
1. All of my most insane subjects come up in her office. Sex. Parenthood. Being naked in front of other people.
2. I don’t know. I was trying not to pay attention. But it’s clear that Mitch has been reading about childbirth behind my back and that he is infatuated with the idea of a natural childbirth, which seems fairly ludicrous to me. I wouldn’t mind a general anesthesia.
<<Beth to Jennifer>> It’s too bad Mitch can’t be the pregnant one.
<<Jennifer to Beth>> Oh my God, he’d love that.
WITH EVERYONE TALKING about New Year’s, Christmas came like an afterthought. Lincoln had to work on Christmas Eve. “Someone has to work,” Greg said, “and it isn’t going to be me. I rented a Santa suit.”