The woman smiled nervously, perhaps weighing exactly how likely it was that Alice was actually a murderer.
“Anyway, thank you,” Alice said. She pulled two dollars out of her wallet and put them in the woman’s tip jar.
Back upstairs, they ordered, then ate. Each dish tasted like it had taken a very, very long time to make. Alice was still hungry. When the table had been cleared, Matt looked up at Alice as she leaned back in her chair. “It’s so good,” she said. “Everything was so good.”
“Okay,” Matt said. The train was leaving the station. He pushed back his chair and bent over slowly, until his hands were on the floor, and then lowered one knee, and then the other. Alice watched in horror as he actually crawled a few steps before straightening his back and scooching forward on his knee. He reached for her hand, and Alice extended it. “Alice Stern,” he began. “Will you order takeout with me and argue about Netflix for the rest of our lives?” Did that even sound good to him? He was still talking. “You are so smart and so funny and, just, really funny, and I want to marry you. Will you marry me?” Had he even mentioned love? Was she funny? What if she wanted to do something other than order takeout and watch television? She had actually thought it was going to be harder to say no. There was a ring in his hand—a beautiful ring that Alice had no interest whatsoever in putting on her finger.
“Matt,” Alice said. She leaned down so that their faces were nearly touching. The restaurant was loud and dark enough that only the people at the closest tables saw what was happening, which made Alice want to go back to the bathroom and apologize again to the woman, and to say, Oh, thank god for this dark, murderous place. “I can’t marry you. I’m so sorry, but I can’t.” He blinked a few times and then pushed back onto his heels and maneuvered awkwardly back into his chair.
“Shit, really?” he said, though his face looked more relaxed. Alice didn’t think he wanted to get married any more than she did. His mother called him on the phone every single day—his older sister did, too. Alice could imagine the pressure on a young, successful man. It was the plot of most novels, wasn’t it? To take a bride? It was the plot of most novels and most people in her socioeconomic stratum: college, job, marriage. Matt was on the tardy side, but still well within normal. Men had more time, of course.
“Really,” Alice said. There was a plate of a mysterious dessert on the table—she hadn’t noticed. It was green and round, wetter than a cake. Flan, maybe, or some sort of pudding. Alice dug in. It tasted like creamed grass. She took another bite. “I think you’ll find the right person. I think it’s great that you want to get married, I do. It’s just not me.”
“There was this girl—this woman—from high school who keeps writing me on Facebook. We went to prom together. She just got divorced.” Matt picked up his spoon and dragged it around the edge of the pudding. “This is kind of weird.”
“I think she sounds perfect.” Alice took one last scoop, straight from the middle, where the grass was deepest. All her life, Alice had wondered if she was doing things wrong, if she was in some way defective, or backward, but maybe it was just that she was exactly like her father, and better off alone. Maybe, she thought, cheering to the notion, her mistake had been assuming that somewhere along the line, everything would fall into place and her life would look just like everyone else’s. At the center of the pudding, hiding, was a dollop of cream. “Ooh, look,” she said. “I won!”
10
As usual, Alice had set up appointments back-to-back all day—there was no way around it. There were too many families on her list to spread them out; it would have taken months. But she did schedule Raphael Joffey as the last child of the day, because that way, if the interview ran long, no one would complain or feel slighted. Alice had also observed over the years that for appointments scheduled in the middle of the day, there was a much higher percentage of absent fathers, whereas if the appointments were either at the very start or end of a day, both parents were more likely to participate.
Tommy hadn’t emailed—it was the wife, of course. The mother. Hannah Joffey. It was always the mothers. There had been no acknowledgment of a personal connection, that Alice was a human whom her husband had once known, and that they had known each other inside these very walls. So many things were automated these days, maybe his wife thought that she was corresponding with a computer, some sort of virtual assistant. Hannah had used the word we, though, and so Alice was expecting all three of them, the whole family. Her office was mostly tidy—after each child and set of parents left, she had a few minutes to finish her notes and put away the puzzles and games and paper and crayons.