“What do you write, at night?” Alice asked her dad. She dug her spoon into the massive heap of sugar in front of her. The sound of her father working—guitars wailing through the speakers, his slippered feet shuffling down the hall, his fingers punching away at the keyboard—was as comforting to her as a white noise machine. It meant he was there, he was writing, and that he was happy, in his way.
“Who, me?” Leonard asked.
“Yes, you,” Alice said. The hot fudge had hardened into very slow lava, and it clung to the weak plastic spoon.
“Stories. Ideas. Different things.”
Alice nodded. This was where she had always left it, before Leonard began to bristle, before she began prying. “So why not publish it? Obviously, any publisher in New York would buy it. Even if it was garbage.”
Leonard put a hand on his heart. “You wound me.”
“I’m not saying that I think it’s garbage, Dad. I’m just saying that it’s sort of no duh. Someone would buy it, and publish it, and give you tons of money. So why not?” Alice blushed.
“I think what Alice is asking, Leonard,” Sam said, “is whether there is a Time Sisters in the works. You know, same general idea, just with girls instead of boys, because girls are smarter in every way.”
Leonard nodded. “I hear you, I do. And thank you, Sam, for what is truthfully a million-dollar idea that I should have had years ago. But what’s the fun in doing something again? If I wrote the same book again, just with different people in it, don’t you think that would be boring?”
Alice and Sam shrugged.
“It’s a bit like Spider-Man, if I may be so bold. When you have a successful book, you have the power to publish another, but the reason the book was successful in the first place creates a sense of responsibility to one’s readers—they liked this, which is why I have that, and so on. There are some writers who write the same book over and over again, once a year, for decades, because their readers enjoy it and they can do it, and they do it well, and that’s that. And then there are some writers, like me”—here Leonard smiled—“who find the whole idea so utterly paralyzing that they’d rather watch Jeopardy! with their teenage daughter and just write what they want to write and not worry about anyone else ever seeing it.”
“Jeopardy! is a really good show,” Sam said. “I get it.”
Alice didn’t think Sam got it. Sam had more academic and intellectual ambition in her toenails than most people had in their entire bodies, just like her mom. Sam had gone straight from undergrad to law school, bing bang boom, without so much as coming up for air. Alice got it, though. She saw it all the time at Belvedere—the parents who carried tennis rackets had children who carried tennis rackets. The parents with drinking problems and well-stocked home bars often were the ones called into the school counselor’s office about the Olde English forty-ounce found in Junior’s locker. The scientists had little scientists; the misogynists had little misogynists. Alice had always thought of her professional life in perfect contrast with her father’s—he’d had wild success, and she, none, just hanging on to something stable like a seahorse with its tail looped around some seagrass—but now she thought that she’d been wrong. He was afraid, too, and happier to stay close to what had worked, rather than risk it all on something new.
“I’m sorry, Dad,” Alice said. “I know how you feel.”
Leonard put his hand on her cheek and gave her a gentle pat. “You always did, you know that? It was very strange. Even when you were a very small child, and I asked you a question, somehow you always knew the answers. It was like someone was hiding in the bushes, and going to jump out and say, Ha! You thought this child knew the difference between a marsupial and a mammal, and she’s only three! But no one ever jumped out. You just knew.”
“You really should, though, Dad. What Sam said. It would be so good—you know it would, don’t you? People would love it. Just because Time Brothers was, like, this world smash doesn’t mean that another book would be a total flop or something. It’s not a reason not to try.”
Leonard dug his spoon into the bottom of his paper cup. “When did you two get so smart, huh?” The girls had already finished their massive quantities of ice cream, and Leonard stood up and collected the detritus and threw it in the garbage can, then swept all the errant, escaped sprinkles off the tabletop and into his palm and threw those away, too. Sam looked at Alice and cocked her head to one side. “I have an idea,” she said. “I have to go home to look at something, but I’ll meet you back at Pomander, okay? Page me if you need me. Thanks for the ice cream, Lenny.”