The moment he sat down, I noticed how bad he looked. Bleary-eyed. It was if his eye sockets had sunk an inch lower on his face. He hadn’t shaved in days, and he had scraggly patches of facial hair. His beard was blond and brown, but all I noticed were the flecks of gray.

He said, “How was your day?”

“Not good. So pile it on. Your dissertation. You’re not going to finish on Friday, are you?”

Tim diverted his eyes to the menu. He sighed and said, “No, I won’t.”

Funny, no matter how ready I was for this disappointment, I didn’t feel ready.

“Kate, you gotta let me explain . . .”

What I couldn’t handle was some sort of explanation, another grand excuse. “I don’t want to hear—”

“There’s a reason I won’t finish on Friday.”

I covered my ears.

“Because I finished it today.”

“What?”

He unzipped his backpack. He removed a gray cardboard box that had been wrapped in a blue ribbon. He set it on my plate. “It’s done.”

In disbelief, I pulled at the ribbon, and it came off easily. I lifted the lid. I saw the cover page. “Done?”

“Done.”

There it was. All those years of work. Five hundred and forty-two dense pages. Endless footnotes. All his. I flipped through it, amazed at the weight of it. He didn’t point out the dedication page. I found it on my own. It read:

to Kate
sorry for the long wait

“That’s something,” I said. “That’s real nice.” I didn’t care if it was good, I realized. I even forgot how long it took to finish. I loved that it was done. And we would’ve celebrated longer if Debbie Beebe hadn’t hurried into the Heights Café and said, “Did you hear?”

“Maybe,” I said as I dried my eyes.

“Did you hear what happened to Anna Brody’s little girl?”

TIM

TIM

THAT NIGHT WE FOUND OURSELVES AT PIERREPONT PLAYGROUND SMACK IN THE middle of a band of other mothers. There were Claudia and Tess and Joan Manker and Suzanne, mother of Trevor and Jack. There were fathers, too—the Weasel, of course, and Dad Without a Clue.

If one were to listen to the many conversations going on around the playground that night, here was what would be learned:

Earlier that night Sophie Brody-Ashworth tripped over/slipped off/fell headfirst from the top of the circular slide at Pierrepont Playground. Her mother, Anna, saw the whole thing happen/didn’t see a thing/wasn’t even at the playground. Sophie’s injury was just a scrape/a deep cut/a nasty gash that exposed her skull bone. She received four stitches/twenty-three stitches/eighty-four stitches and her jaw was wired shut. Finally, when the ambulances arrived, Sophie was fully conscious/unconscious but not yet in a coma/brain-dead.