Attach ments(77)

“When did it end?”

“Slightly before it started,” Lincoln said.

Chuck barked a laugh, little bursts of steam breaking the January air.

“Isn’t it too cold to play golf?” Lincoln asked.

“Sunshine gives me a headache,” Chuck said.

LINCOLN DIDN’T CHANGE his mind. He didn’t feel like parties. Or games. Or people.

Three weeks. That’s how long it had been since Beth and Jennifer had turned up in the WebFence folder. This is good, Lincoln told himself. Even if it doesn’t make sense for them to be so quiet. Even if it’s wildly out of character. They’re making it easy for you. Easier.

He decided to rent a movie, Harold and Maude. He hadn’t watched it since high school, and he wanted to watchthe scene at the end where Harold drives his Jaguar off a cliff and then starts to play the banjo. He hoped nobody from the newspaper would be at Blockbuster to see him rent Harold and Maude. (Chuck told him that before they knew his name, everyone on the copy desk called Lincoln “Doris’s Boyfriend.”) He almost hid the video box when someone touched his arm.

“Lincoln. Lincoln? Is that you?”

He turned.

The strange thing about seeing someone for the first time in nine years is the way they look totally different, just for a second, a split second, and then they look to you the way they always have, as if no time has passed between you.

Sam looked exactly like Sam. Small. Curly brown hair—a little longer now, not in that all-over-the- place bob that had been popular in college. Wide sparkling eyes, so dark you could hardly see her pupils. Black clothes that looked like she’d bought them out of state. Silver rings on her fingers. A pink necktie tied at her waist like a belt.

She was still touching him. She’d taken hold of both his arms.

“Lincoln!” she said.

Lincoln didn’t move or speak, but he felt like Keanu Reeves in that scene from The Matrix, when he slows down time to dodge a hail of bullets.

“I just can’t believe it’s you.” She squeezed his arms, grabbed the front of his jacket, pressed her palms on his chest. “Oh my God. You look exactly the same.”

She pulled his jacket toward her. He didn’t come with it.

“You even smell the same,” she said, “peaches! I can’t believe it’s you. How are you?” She tugged at his jacket again. “How are you!”

“I’m good,” he said. “Just fine.”

“It’s kismet that I’m running into you,” Sam said. “I just moved back last month, and I’ve been thinking about you every day. I don’t think I have a memory of this city that doesn’t include you.

Every time I go to my folks’ house or get on the freeway, my head’s like, ‘Lincoln, Lincoln, Lincoln.’ God, it’s good to see you. How are you? Really? I mean, the last I heard, well …” She made a sad face. She touched his arms, his shoulders, his chin. “But that was years ago …How are you? How are you now? Tell me everything!”

“Oh, you know,” he said. “I’m here. Working. I mean, I work. With computers. Not here-here.

Around.” What else could he say? That he still lived with his mom? That he was renting a movie that he’d probably watched with Sam the first time? That she was the Jaguar he needed to drive off the cliff?

Except she wasn’t. Was she?

Lincoln felt a surge of something like strength. He set down Harold and Maude, surreptitiously, and picked up something else, Hairspray.

“What about you?” he asked. “What brought you back?”

“Oh God.” Sam rolled her eyes, like it would take three hours and a Greek chorus to explain.

“Work. Family. I came back because I wanted my boys to get to know their grandparents. Can you believe I’m a mom? God! And there’s this job at the Playhouse. In development, fund-raising, you know, making rich people feel important. Behind the scenes, but not off the stage. I don’t know, it’s a big change. A big risk. Liam is staying in Dublin for six months just in case this isn’t a good move.

Did you know I’ve been in Dublin?”

“Dublin,” Lincoln said. “With Liam. Your husband?”

“As such,” Sam said, making another it’s-an-unbearably-long-story gesture. “I swore I’d never marry another man with a foreign passport. Once bitten, et cetera.” She said it in three hard syllables.

Et-cet-ra. Her hands, small with perfectly manicured pink nails, flew around as she talked but kept landing on Lincoln’s chest and arm.

“I’ll tell you the whole adventure sometime,” she said to him, “sometime soon. We have to catch up. I’ve always felt that two people who shared as much as we did and shared such important years should never have drifted apart.” Her voice dropped intimately. From stage to screen. “It just isn’t right.