Page 30

Saturday, April 15, 2023 (Alba is 23, Zach is 22, Clare is 51)

Zach: The weather has been disconcertingly warm for days. As Alba and I walk along Lincoln Avenue, petals fall prematurely from the trees, gathering in wilting brown piles on the pavement. “Fuck off, Summer, I want Spring back,” Alba says. I’m still not attuned to Chicago’s weather, but even I know that 80 degrees day after day is eerie here in mid-April. We hold each other’s sweaty hands as we walk, navigating around outdoor café diners, bikes locked haphazardly to various objects, chalkboards announcing specials on used vinyl, pedicures, mustache wax—“Hey, maybe I should grow a ’stache,” I say to Alba.

She grimaces and gently tugs on my hand. “This way.” We cross the street and we’re in a quaint little plaza, with a dry fountain and an empty bandstand. There are humans and dogs everywhere. A tiny Black girl with a lightsaber crashes into me and runs off, her dad apologizing over his shoulder as he chases after her. “Here,” Alba says. “Café Selmarie.” It’s very crowded inside. As we edge past glass cases full of opulent pastry I catch the comforting scents of butter, coffee, chocolate. The hostess tells Alba, “Your mom’s already here.”

We follow the hostess across the bustling dining room toward a corner table, where a middle-aged woman hurriedly shuts off her phone and rises to greet us. She’s smiling, but there’s something apprehensive in her expression. She’s a little shorter than Alba, and more curvaceous; she has a heart-shaped, Pre-Raphaelite face, waist-length red hair, coppery and streaked with white, and her enormous eyes are pale gray, like Alba’s. She’s wearing a mint-green knit dress that looks soft and expensive. Alba says, “Mama, this is Zach Purcell. Zach, my mother, Clare DeTamble.” Alba’s mom extends her hand and I take it, nervously. Her skin is surprisingly rough.

“Zach,” she says. “I would say, ‘I’ve heard so much about you,’ but Alba’s been pretty secretive.”

“Oh, Mama,” Alba says. “I told you enough.” Alba leans across the table and gives her mother a half hug. We seat ourselves, talk for a while about nothing much, order food. I think about Alba not telling her mom about me; she hasn’t said a lot to me about her family, either. Alba tends to hoard information. These days, that’s just common sense. I tell Alba more than I tell anyone else. I wonder what Gomez and Charisse have told Clare about me? It seems strange that I haven’t met Alba’s mom before, since she’s such good friends with them. Did Alba ask her not to come around their place because I’m staying there?

“I thought Beck was coming to lunch with us?” Alba says.

“She was, but she had to go to Detroit,” Clare replies.

“Are Gram and Gramps okay?”

“Yeah, they’re fine, it’s got to do with Jasper,” Clare says. “Someone told Beck they’d seen him, and he wasn’t doing too well. She’s been there since Thursday. She just texted to tell me she’s on her way home. She couldn’t find him.”

Alba seems relieved. Beck is Alba’s stepmother; I don’t know who Jasper is. The waitress brings our food: mac and cheese for me, vegetarian chili for Alba, a salad for Clare. I wonder if I should have ordered something greener? “That was Alba’s dad’s favorite,” Clare says, nodding at my plate, and I feel an endorphin hit of approval.

She asks the usual questions: about growing up in Tulsa, what am I studying, how do I like Chicago, on and on. Before we arrived, Alba warned me to pay attention: My mother should have been a detective. She’s spent all these years trying to pry information out of my dad and me, about horrible stuff we don’t want to tell her. Even so, I’m caught off guard when Clare says, “I understand you’re working for Gomez now. How was the Easter Parade?”

Easter was last Sunday, and there was an actual parade, of a sort, in front of Gomez’s 50th Ward aldermanic office, mostly dogs wearing funny hats and rabbit costumes, some pulling toddlers in little red wagons. But Easter Parade is also the code name of an effort to expose a bunch of white supremacists’ links to an Illinois congressman. We gave the information we had to some journalists last weekend, and I’ve been watching the internet anxiously ever since. I can’t tell whether Clare is asking about kids or neo-Nazis. “Kind of underwhelming,” I reply. “We put a fair amount of planning into it, but not that many people showed up.”

“What a pity,” she says. “Maybe next year you could get some extra dogs from the Humane Society. Maybe have a dog-hat-making workshop for the kids?”

“That’s a thought,” I say. “If you want to help out I can put you on the list?”

“To make hats for dogs?” Alba has no idea what we’re talking about, either.

“Eh, I usually leave Gomez and Charisse to their own hat making unless it’s an emergency,” Clare replies. “I just wondered how the parade went—sorry we weren’t able to be there to cheer you on.” I’m still unclear as to whether I just filled Clare in on the status of Easter Parade or the actual Easter Parade or what, so I take out my phone and show her photos of the neighborhood children with their decorated eggs and be-hatted dogs. James Bond I am not.

The conversation wanders into less confusing channels. The waitress takes our plates away. We order coffee and dessert because Clare insists that I have to try the apple galette. In the past, when I had to meet my various high school girlfriends’ parents, my mother told me that if I hit a conversational wall I should ask them how they met each other. “Everybody loves to talk about how they met their sweetie,” Mom assured me. She and my dad met on a blind date, as college students, very boring. I imagine that Alba’s parents might have a more unusual story. When I ask Clare how she met Alba’s dad, she and Alba exchange embarrassed glances, then burst out laughing.

“Yes or no?” Clare asks Alba. Alba shakes her head, but then says, “Go ahead. He loves that kind of thing. Causal loops.”

In a low voice, Clare begins, “I met Henry when I was six years old. I was playing in the meadow in back of my parents’ house, in rural Michigan, and there was a man, hiding in the tall grass because he was naked.” She pauses. Where is this story going? I try to keep my face neutral. Clare continues, “So I loaned him my beach towel to wear, and he explained that he was a time traveler, and how it was—he couldn’t bring anything with him, so he would need me to bring clothing and keep it in the meadow for him—and after that he just kept showing up, until eventually I met him in the present. By then I was twenty, and he was twenty-eight. That was when Henry met me for the first time. He was a librarian at the Newberry Library, and I came to look at a book. So we ‘first met’ twice. It seemed natural to me, because I’d grown up expecting that someday our timelines would cross in ordinary time, and eventually they did.”

“Wow. That’s—romantic?” I say. I’m extremely uncomfortable with the idea of a child meeting her adult future husband naked in some lonely meadow.

Clare blushes. “I don’t tell that story to many people, it squicks them out.” The waitress arrives with our coffee and desserts. I take a bite of the galette. It reminds me of something that I can’t identify, an infant memory so remote that it’s just an echo, sweetness and security.

Alba says, “I think those people are missing the bigger problem. If your life is a huge causal loop, you don’t have freedom of choice. There’s no moment when you or Dad chose each other; you were always locked together in a great big deterministic circle.”

“Fortunately, neither of us minded,” Clare says. “We would have chosen each other—we did choose each other, moment by moment, day by day. I feel very lucky to have loved and been loved by Henry. When he died, I wasn’t myself for a long time.” She says this matter-of-factly, but I don’t know how to respond; the conversation has veered into intimacy so abruptly that I’m lost. No one I love has died, yet. I’m estranged from my parents, but if I want to, I know how to find them.

“I’m sorry,” I finally manage. When Alba talks about her dad, she talks about him in the present tense. For Clare, he’s in the past.

“Thanks,” Clare says, automatically. “Hey, I didn’t mean to dump all that on you.” She takes Alba’s hand, squeezes it. “We’re fine now. Mostly. ‘Time heals all wounds.’”

“Does it?” I ask them.

“Not quite,” Alba says. “I think loss just mutates. You can’t have the person you lost, so you rebuild yourself around that emptiness.”

Clare says to Alba, “But sometimes you meet someone who diverts you; you can’t have what you had, but you can go on.” To me she says, “You didn’t grow up practicing to be a time traveler’s boyfriend. I imagine it must be disconcerting?”

“Yes. I mean, nothing too crazy has happened. So far. Alba’s told me some stories . . .”