Seven Minutes to Noon

suction the BE RIGHT BACK sign to the front door. She rummaged through her purse for her keys.
    The children raced into the dark shop. Alice switched on the lights, instantly brightening the painted-silver tin ceiling, the high gloss of the oak floors, the rich depth of the blue walls. Pinging awake the displays of gorgeous shoes. Blue Shoes had kept its promise and become “Brooklyn’s footwear fashion destination,” a prediction made by a tiny newspaper article that appeared when they first opened last winter. Alice loved her partnership with Maggie, the bustle of their store. It was a sane, even fun compromise between her former work life as a film editor and her current life as a mother. They had jointly dubbed the store a midlife reinvention, an experiment that, blissfully, had worked.
    Alice checked the answering machine under the stone counter, its creamy green glaze dazzling in the halogen light. Nothing. Maggie and Ethan arrived minutes later and the four children, lifelong friends, gathered on the center bench to inspect Nell’s latest pack of Yu-Gi-Oh! cards.
    Maggie, in flowing butter-yellow pants and a cornflower-blue tank top, with her mop of blond hair pinned highon her head, strode through the store like a queen defiant of the heat.
    “Anything?” Maggie asked.
    Alice shook her head.
    They went straight for the computer in the back room and found Tim’s numbers. His cell phone went right to voice mail, so they tried his office. His secretary told them he was away on business. When pressed, she explained that he was taking depositions in Chicago.
    “When he calls in,” Alice asked the secretary, “please ask him to call me as soon as possible. Tell him—” She hesitated to leave an alarming message, but decided spontaneously to follow her instinct. “Tell him Lauren didn’t meet me today when she said she would, and I can’t reach her anywhere, and being as she’s nearly full-term, naturally I thought that possibly—”
    “The baby.” The secretary summed up Alice’s worries so efficiently.
    “Yes,” Alice said. “The baby.”
    “I’ll get the message through to him.”
    “Thank you.” Alice recited her cell and home numbers, hung up the phone and turned to Maggie. “I’m getting really worried. Do you still have her key?” Maggie had been in charge of plant watering at Lauren and Tim’s while they were away recently.
    “I do,” Maggie said. “I’ll tell you what, while you’ve got the kids, I’ll make some calls. I’ll start with Methodist, where she’s supposed to have the baby, and if she’s not there, I’ll try other hospitals. And I’ll call the exercise place, see if she made it to class. If I don’t come up with anything, I’ll go over to her apartment.”
    “Good idea, Mags.”
    “I wish I could tell you to have a glass of wine,” Maggie said, her eyes squinting in a kind of feline smile. “You’ve had a hard day, darling. Please, leave the worry to me.”
    “You’re not good enough at it,” Alice said.
    “Well, you’re too good at it.” Maggie leaned in to kiss Alice on the cheek. Her perfume was light and flowery.“Don’t think about that horrid notice — you’ll move when you move. And we’re going to hear from Lauren any minute. She probably lost herself at the Barneys warehouse sale. I was there yesterday and I was nearly late back myself.”
    Alice appreciated Maggie’s efforts to distract her from the day’s disappointments, but it was no use. “Lauren doesn’t shop at Barneys,” Alice said. “And she’s never been late for anything in her life.”
    “An impossibility,” Maggie countered, “even for the prompt and brilliant Lauren Barnet.”
    The kids were getting restless; Peter and Austin had already drifted through the front door onto the sidewalk.
    “Call me if you find out anything,” Alice told Maggie in parting. “I’m stopping at Cattaneo’s for barbecue stuff, then going straight home.”
    Alice ushered the band of children up to Court Street and a few more blocks to the neighborhood butcher. They loved coming to Cattaneo’s for a chance to skate in the sawdust that covered the floor and also for the lollipops, which Sal Cattaneo himself doled out to children after every sale.
    Cattaneo’s was a nice, clean, well-lit store with neat shelves of bottled gourmet sauces that hadn’t been there when Alice first arrived in the neighborhood fifteen years ago, pregentrification. She stood at the glass counter