Seven Minutes to Noon

come back down.”
    “Where Tim?”
    “Stop it,” Alice said. “It’s getting annoying.”
    Mike leaned in close to Alice and lowered his voice to a near whisper, meant to elude the children’s radar. “Seriously, did you hear from Lauren yet?”
    He smelled like fresh-cut wood. “Nope,” she whispered back. “Tim’s on his way back to Brooklyn.”
    Mike was uncharacteristically quiet a moment, fiddling with something in his pants pocket. “She’s okay, though. Right?”
    “Right.” Maggie ripped apart a sheet of soft hamburger buns.
    “So, where’s that notice you got today?” A shadow seemed to drift over the natural glint of light in his eyes, and Alice knew he was worried too.
    “Upstairs, in my purse.”
    Twenty minutes later — ample time both for a shower and a look at the bad news of their Thirty Day Notice — Mike reappeared. In clean jeans and a white T-shirt, allscrubbed and fresh, he looked five years younger than his thirty-nine years. Alice watched him as he strode across the yard toward the children, the neck of a chilled beer dangling between two fingers. He settled down on the side of the sandbox, apparently forgetting all about the man-meat equation, and peppered the children with questions and jokes that elicited bursts of giggly disbelief.
    “He’s good at that,” Maggie said.
    “He is.” Alice flipped a sizzling turkey burger with the spatula. She knew exactly what Maggie meant. “That’s partly why I fell in love with him. He reminds me not to take myself too seriously.”
    “He’s sexy too, you know.” Maggie raised her eyebrows. Alice turned around to look at Mike with the four children. He had gotten into the sandbox with them. She supposed he was sexy, though volatile pregnancy hormones along with the wiles of time tended to let her forget that.
    Maggie took the spatula from Alice’s hand and nudged a hot dog along the grill; she liked hers cooked bubbly black on all sides. In the moment they didn’t speak, Alice felt the downward shift of the late afternoon sun dragging away whole degrees of heat. A damp coolness settled on the air.
    “So?” Alice said suddenly. “Where is she? Why hasn’t she called? When will Tim get here?”
    “I’m sure she’s fine,” Maggie said. “I admit it’s strange she hasn’t called. But she’s almost nine months pregnant. I’m sure she had the baby today. I’m sure we’ll hear from her any minute. Aren’t you?”
    “I’m just as determined as you are to believe that, Mags,” Alice said.
    Alice covered the long picnic table with a red and white checkered oilcloth she had bought years ago at Manny’s Variety, the Dominican sundries shop Blue Shoes had displaced. Maggie counted out enough paper plates to include Tim and Lauren, just in case. Mike marched the children into the house to wash their hands while thewomen served up the food. Alice set down a small tray of hot dogs nestled in buns, then turned to Maggie.
    “What do we say to Austin?”
    “We tell him the truth,” Maggie said. “We say Lauren will call any minute. We say she probably had the baby today and Daddy’s with her.”
    Alice nodded, muttering, “Okay, then.”
    But Austin didn’t ask. He had lived his entire young life with the three families melded in nearly every way, and being without his parents in the Halpern family backyard was not unusual.
    Finally, just past eight, Alice’s cell phone rang. She pulled it from her shorts’ pocket and immediately saw that it was Tim.
    “I’m outside. I’ve been ringing the doorbell but I don’t think you heard it.”
    “I’ll be right there.” She flipped shut her phone.
    “Want me to go?” Mike began to shift himself off the bench, but she stopped him.
    “It’s okay,” she said calmly, though she felt anything but calm. Heart pounding, she walked up the stairs onto the tiny iron deck and passed through the kitchen, living room and into the hallway to get to the building’s foyer. In the half-moon window toward the top of the house’s front door, Alice saw Tim’s sharp profile, looking distractedly toward the street.
    She opened the door. Tim walked in and at first said nothing. Medium height, and lean from his weekend hours at the gym, he was dressed in one of the beautiful suits he always wore to work. His thick blond hair was wavy, tucked behind his ears; normally he kept it shorter than this. When he looked at Alice to speak, she saw, in the dimming evening light, that his skin