Landline (13 page)

“I don’t know what it is.”

“Is my voice lower?” That would make sense. She was fifteen years closer to menopause. “Maybe it’s the crying.”

“No,” he said. “I don’t think so. You seem . . . like you’re being really careful.”

“I
am
being really careful.”

“You seem like you’re not sure of anything.”

“I’m not,” she said.

“Yeah, but Georgie, ‘sure of everything’ is kind of your signature color.”

She laughed. “Was that a
Steel Magnolias
reference?”

“You know all about my Sally Field crush,” he said. “I’m not apologizing for it now.”

She’d forgotten about Neal’s Sally Field crush. “I know all your dirty Gidget secrets,” she said.

“It was the Flying Nun who really did it for me.”

Had
Georgie been sure of everything at twenty-two?

She’d had a plan.

She’d always had a plan. It seemed like the smart thing to do—have a plan and follow it, until you have solid reasons to change course.

Neal had the opposite approach. His one big plan, oceanography, had gone sour on him; and then his plan turned into keeping his eyes open until something better came along.

Georgie used to think she could fix that for him. She was really good at making plans, and Neal was really good at everything else; this seemed like a no-brainer.

“You could just do
this
for a living,” Georgie said one night at
The Spoon
, before they even started dating.

“Entertain you?” Neal said. “Sounds good. How are the benefits?”

She was sitting across from him (always sitting across from him) leaning on his drafting table. “No. This.
Stop the Sun.
You’re good enough—I thought you were already syndicated.”

“You are very kind,” he said. “Very wrong, but very kind.”

“I’m serious.”

“I couldn’t do this for a living.” He gave the woodchuck he was drawing a cigar. “It’s just messing around—it’s just doodling.”

“So you wouldn’t want to be Matt Groening?”

“With all due respect, no.”

“Why not?”

Neal shrugged. “I want to do something real. I want to make a difference.”

“Making people laugh is real.”

The corner of his mouth twitched. “I’ll let you take up that mantle.”

“Do you think that comedy is just messing around, too?”

“Honestly?” he asked.

“Of course, honestly.”

“Then yes.”

Georgie sat up straighter and folded her arms on the table. “You think my dreams are a waste of time?”

“I think your dreams would be a waste of
my
time,” he said. “I wouldn’t be happy.”

“So what
would
make you happy?”

“Well, if I knew that, I’d do it.” He’d looked up at her then, his eyes pained and almost too sincere for the circumstances, for the bright lights and the basement of the student union. He held his dip pen over the margin of his comic and let it drip. “I mean it. If I figure out what makes me happy, I’m not going to waste any more time. I’m just going to grab it. I’m just going to
do
it.”

Georgie nodded. “I believe you.”

Neal smiled and looked down, sheepish now, shaking his head a bit. “Sorry. I’ve had too much time in my own head lately.”

She waited for him to start inking again. “You could be a doctor . . . ,” she said.

“Maybe.”

“You have doctorly hands. I can imagine you performing very neat stitches.”

“Weird,” he said. “But thank you.”

“Lawyer?”

Neal shook his head.

“Indian chief?”

“Don’t have the connections.”

“Well,” Georgie said, “that’s all I’ve got—wait. Butcher? Baker? Candlestick maker?”

“None of those sound bad, honestly. The world needs bakers.”

“And candlestick makers,” she added.

“Actually, I’ve been thinking about—” Neal glanced up at her, then looked down, licking his lips. “—I’ve been thinking about the Peace Corps.”

“The Peace Corps? Really?”

“Yeah. It’d give me something worthwhile to do while I figure the rest out.”

“I didn’t know there was still a Peace Corps.”

“That or the Air Force,” Neal said.

“Aren’t those two radically different directions?”

“Not at all.” He glanced up over her shoulder, then lowered his eyebrows and looked down.

Georgie knew that expression. She sat up and turned around to see what Seth wanted.

Seth had stepped all the way into the production room—usually he didn’t come past the door. But tonight he sat down on a stool near Georgie and leaned onto a desk. “Hey, Neal, what’s going on?”

“Not much,” Neal muttered without looking up.

Seth nodded and turned to Georgie. “So we’re just waiting on that cover story. Mike and Brian are still hammering it out.”

Georgie looked down at her watch.
The Spoon
went to press tonight. She and Seth were the managing editors, so they’d have to wait for the story, set it, then send the files to the printer. It’d be a late night.

“There’s no reason for both of us to stay,” Seth told her. “You should just take off.”

“That’s okay,” Georgie said. “I’ll stay. You go home.”

Seth wrinkled his nose. She was pretty sure he did it because it was adorable. She was pretty sure Seth had practiced all his facial expressions and gestures in front of a mirror, and worked out which ones made him look like a cross between an Abercrombie model and a kitten. “I don’t want to dump it on you,” he said. “You might be here all night.”

“I really don’t mind,” she said. “Don’t you have a date?”

He nodded slowly. “I do have a date.”

“With the lovely Breanna, I’ve heard.”

“With the lovely Breanna,” Seth said, still nodding; he pursed his lips and twisted them to the side.

“Go on,” she said. “You can owe me.”

Seth narrowed his eyes at Georgie, then at Neal, then seemed to make up his mind. “Okay.” He stood up. “I owe you.”

“Have fun on your date,” she said.

He got as far as the door, then spun around. “You know what? I’ll call Breanna. I can’t just abandon you like this. It’s going to be late, you’ll have to walk to your car by yourself—”

“Don’t worry about it,” Neal said. Georgie looked back at him, surprised to hear his voice. “I’ll be here,” he said. “I’ll make sure she gets to her car.”

Seth stared at Neal. Georgie was pretty sure they’d never made eye contact before; she waited for one or both of them to start on fire.

“What a gentleman,” Seth said.

“It’s nothing,” Neal parried.

“Great,” Georgie said, trying to signal Seth with her eyes—wishing they had a nonverbal sign for
Leave me alone with this cute guy, you idiot.
“Problem solved. Go ahead, Seth. Go on your date. Get down with your bad self.”

“I guess that’s settled then. . . .” Seth nodded again. “All right. Well. See you tomorrow, Georgie. You still coming over? To my room?”

“Yep. Give me a call when you sweep out the lovely Breanna and all of her underthings.”

“Right,” he said, and finally walked away.

Georgie turned back to Neal, feeling fluttery.

“You have terrible taste in sidekicks,” he said after a moment.

“Writing partner,” she corrected.

“Hmm.”

Neal
did
walk her to her car that night. And he
was
a perfect gentleman.

Much to Georgie’s disappointment.

Neal had sounded different, too, last night on the phone.

His voice was a little higher, his thoughts came out looser. Neal with less clench, less control.

He’d sounded like the boy on the other side of the drafting table.

S
eth and Scotty both liked to be laughed at.

As long as Georgie laughed at their jokes, they usually wouldn’t notice that she wasn’t contributing to the brainstorming, that she was just writing things they said on the whiteboard and underlining them.

But today wasn’t usually. Seth was still watching Georgie like he was trying to figure out was going on. . . .

Well, he could keep on trying—he was never going to come up with,
Magic fucking phone!
(Though Georgie was a little worried he’d figure out she wasn’t wearing underwear.)

Seth and Scotty brainstormed.

Georgie brain-hurricaned.

What if it
was
happening for a reason? What if she was supposed to fix what was wrong between her and Neal? “What’s wrong?” wasn’t such an easy question to answer.

Oh, she could answer it broadly:

A lot.

A lot was wrong between them, even on good days. . . .

(The breakfast-in-bed and coming-home-early days. Days when Neal’s eyes were bright. When the girls made him smile, and he made them laugh. Easy days. Christmas mornings. Coming-home-late days when Neal would catch Georgie at the door and crowd her against the wall.)

Even on
good
days, Georgie knew that Neal was unhappy.

And that it was her fault.

It wasn’t just that she let him down, and put him off, and continually left him waiting—

It was that she’d tied him to her so tight. Because she
wanted
him. Because he was perfect for Georgie, even if she wasn’t perfect for him. Because she wanted him more than she wanted him to be happy.

If she loved Neal, if she really loved him . . .

Shouldn’t she want more for him than
with me, always with me
?

What if Georgie could give Neal the chance to start over? What would he do?

Would he join the Peace Corps? Would he go back to Omaha? Marry Dawn? Marry somebody even better than Dawn?

Would he be happy?

Would he come home from work every night, smiling? Would Dawn or Better-Than-Dawn already have dinner on the table?

Would Neal crawl into bed and pull her close to him, fall asleep with his nose in the hollow of her neck. . . .

Georgie had gotten that far in her imagining—to Neal spooning with his more-suitable-than-Georgie wife—when she imagined Neal’s second-chance
kids
in this second-chance world. Then she slammed the door shut on all his hypothetical happiness.

If the universe thought Georgie was going to erase
her kids
from the timeline, it had another fucking thing coming.

She went to the bathroom and cried for a few minutes. (That was one good thing about being the only woman on the writing staff—Georgie almost always had the bathroom to herself.)

Then she spent the next hour mentally throwing the yellow rotary phone down a deep well and filling it in with concrete.

She wasn’t going to
touch
that thing again.

It wasn’t really a conduit to the past. It wasn’t magic. There was no such thing as magic.
(I
don’t
believe in fairies. Sorry, Peter Pan.)
But Georgie still wasn’t going to risk it. She wasn’t a Time Lord, she didn’t want a Time-Turner. She felt weird even praying for things—because it didn’t seem like she should ask God for something that wasn’t already part of the plan.

What if Georgie accidentally erased her marriage with these phone calls? What if she erased her kids? What if she’d already screwed something up—would she even know?

She tried to remind herself that this was all an illusion. That she didn’t have to worry about the dangerous implications, because illusions don’t have implications.

That’s what she tried to remind herself, but she wasn’t sure she believed it.

Illusion.

Delusion. Mirage.

Magic fucking phone.

“Korean tacos again?” Seth asked.

Georgie nodded.

After two months of hanging out in
The Spoon
’s production room, Georgie was 53 percent sure that Neal liked her.

He put up with her; that seemed to mean something. He never asked her to go away.
(Was she really going to put that in the plus column? Not asking her to go away?)

He talked to her. . . .

But only if Georgie talked to him first. If she sat across from him long enough.

Sometimes it seemed like Neal might be flirting with her. Other times, she couldn’t even tell whether he was listening.

She decided to test him.

The next time Neal came down to
The Spoon
, Georgie said hi, but she stayed at her desk, hoping that
he
might come to
her
for once.

He didn’t.

She tried it again a few days later. Neal nodded when Georgie said hello, but he didn’t stop or walk over.

She told herself to take the hint.

“I notice you seem to be avoiding the hobbit hole,” Seth observed.

“I’m not avoiding,” Georgie said. “I’m working.”

“Oh, right,” he said. “You’re working. I’ve noticed your uncrackable work ethic all those nights you barricaded yourself back in the hobbit hole just as soon as Bilbo showed his face.”

“Are you complaining about my work ethic now?”

“I’m not complaining, Georgie. I’m
noticing.
”

“Well, stop,” she said.

“Did he break it off? Were you too tall for him?”

“We’re the same height. Actually.”

“Really. That’s adorable. Like salt and pepper shakers.”

Georgie must have looked 53 percent wrecked because Seth let it drop. Later, when they were working on their column, both of them huddled in front of Georgie’s computer, Seth gave her ponytail a solid pull. “You’re too good for him.”

He said it quietly.

Georgie didn’t turn from her screen. “Probably not.”

He pulled her hair again. “Too tall. And too pretty. And too good.”

Georgie swallowed.

“I’m not worried about you,” Seth said. “Someday your prince will come.”

“And you’ll do your best to scare him off.”

“I’m glad that we both understand the terms.” He pulled her hair.

“That hurts, you know.”