Seven Minutes to Noon

her narrow glasses. “Anyway, how long did you think you could lastin that apartment? Were you planning to put all four kids into one room?”
    Yes, Alice thought but didn’t answer. It was a large, beautiful room. Alice had envisioned two sets of bunk beds; people in the city did it all the time. But she had to admit that, put so bluntly, it sounded like a patently bad idea.
    “Please, Gamma,” Peter begged, nuzzling closer into Lizzie’s armpit. “Stay.”
    “I wish I could.” Looking squarely at Alice, Lizzie added, “I’ve got a few more things to tell your mother that don’t carry on the phone. Two days should do it.”
    The voice that was too loud over the phone was pitched perfectly for Lizzie in person. As a teenager, Alice had once accused her mother of thinking of herself as larger than life. “Wrong,” Lizzie had countered. “I’m as big as life. I match it. When you grow up, you’ll learn the difference.”
    By now Alice knew. The difference was in the choices you made, how you calibrated your reactions. Her mother had always dived into the wave when it overtook her.
    Just before five o’clock, Mike finally called Alice, offering to pick up some Middle Eastern food on his way home. Alice agreed it was a good idea. Strangely, he said nothing about his long absence or his failure to return her earlier call.
    “That was a long hour,” she said, wanting to hold on to her understanding of him, with its implicit forgiveness, but instead succumbing irresistibly to resentment. Why had he needed to escape her today? Why hadn’t he been able to forgive her for the accident? Why was work and not home a balm for his pain?
    “It was the longest hour of my life,” he said quietly. “It’s over now.”
    She wondered if the wood ever got to the workshop. If the table had taken shape.
    “I was getting a little upset—” she began.
    “You don’t have to tell me, Alice. I know.”
    They stayed on the phone, saying nothing. Finally she let go the strand of her irritation; it was useless and almost arbitrary in the context of everything else.
    “It’s okay,” she told him. “Just come home. We’re all waiting for you.”
    Half an hour later Alice, Mike, Lizzie and the kids were seated around the kitchen table, eating paper plates of humus, baba ghanoush, skewered lamb and fresh pita. Mike seemed okay, Alice thought, considering. Today had been painful; she had missed him more these hours than she had thought she could since their first bloom of love. She was glad he had taken some time, since he needed it. And glad he was back home.
    Lizzie was to sleep on the foldout couch in the living room. Mike took the kids downstairs to put them to bed while Alice arranged the sofa bed. Lizzie got changed in the bathroom, emerging in a lavender spaghetti-strap nightgown with feathery trim at her knees and matching slippers that looked like powder puffs. Her skin was loose and tan, but not from lying on the beach; Lizzie worked long hours, and her tans were purchased at a salon.
    Alice pulled back the covers and got into the sofa bed, laying her head on the pillow. Lizzie slid in next to her, running her fingers through Alice’s short peachy hair. Her mother’s soft skin was still heaven to Alice.
    “I never knew where you got this red hair,” Lizzie said. “It didn’t come from Rich and it didn’t come from me.”
    “Do you remember you used to tell me my freckles were fairy dust?”
    Lizzie’s laugh was throaty. “Oh yeah, that one. Sure, I remember.”
    “I believed you.”
    “Well, babydoll, it was what you needed to hear back then.” Lizzie traced Alice’s face with her fingertip: forehead, nose, cheekbones, chin. It was what she had done to help Alice relax at night when she was young, troubled by insomnia even then.
    “I took the sleeping pill the doctor gave me,” Alice said, “but I don’t feel it working yet.”
    “It will. Just wait. You’ll see.”
    “Thanks for coming, Mom.”
    “Mmm hmm.”
    Downstairs, the bedtime clatter quieted. Peter was always put to bed first, being the youngest, then Nell. Mike was probably lying in Nell’s bed right now, telling her a story.
    “Tell me a story, Mom.”
    “Do you remember your father?”
    “A little, not much. I was eight when he left. Shouldn’t I remember him better?”
    “He was a bastard, a real loser, but when he dumped us for that bimbo, my heart was broken,” Lizzie said. “I mean broken.”
    “She was a marine