This is chapter seven of the serial novella By the Time You Read This. Begin reading here, or listen to Chapters 1-5 here.
Caroline showers and dresses, gets ready for school, and walks into the kitchen, searching for her mother. That feeling again: something is out of whack. The house does not smell of coffee. Her lunchbox is not sitting on the counter, packed and ready to go. Her mother is not offering her scrambled eggs, sourdough toast with jam. Her mother is not pushing her to “drink a glass of milk, it will keep you full all morning.” Her mother is not here at all.
The car keys still hang on the hook inside the old open brick rotisserie—a leftover feature from when the original owners built the house in 1951. Caroline’s family has never roasted a chicken or anything else in the nook built into the kitchen wall. They are not culinary in that way. They use it instead for library books, mail, and car keys.
She pours herself a glass of water from the tap, checks the time: 7:55. They usually leave for school at 7:50. Her dad walks into the kitchen. He is wearing a suit, his hair still damp from the shower.
“Where’s mom?” Caroline asks.
“Maybe she went out.”
It sounds absurd when he says it. Anna doesn’t just “go out” in the morning. She takes their daughter to school, then comes home and showers, then makes another pot of coffee and disappears into her home office to work. Has done so for years. In just a couple of months, Caroline will get her driver’s license and will drive herself to school. In the meantime, Liam knows, Anna cherishes those mornings in the car together, no matter how sullen and silent Caroline may be.
Liam knows that his wife feels acutely the passage of time. Who doesn’t? But for her, it has always been a bit extreme. When they met he was thirty years old, and she told him she was twenty-six. It was on her birthday, when he was putting the candles on the cake he’d baked from a mix, that he realized she had deceived him. She counted the 27 candles and took two off. “But I thought you were turning twenty-seven,” he’d said. “You told me you were 26.”
“No, I meant I was going to be twenty-six any minute, because I was almost twenty-five.”
The math made no sense, but he realized she wasn’t lying. Not really. In her mind, time passed so quickly, the numbers got muddled.
He texts Anna. “Where are you?”
Caroline texts her mom. “Where r u!”
For nearly a minute, both of them stand there, staring at their phones. Waiting. No response.
Caroline grabs a granola bar from the cabinet and tosses it in her backpack. “I’m gonna be late for school.”
Liam has an important meeting in the city in 40 minutes. Even if he left right now and drove straight to work, he’d be cutting it close.
“Can you get there some other way?” he asks.
“You mean, like, teleport?” She’s not smiling. These days, Caroline doesn’t smile much. Parents whose kids have gone through this stage and emerged on the other side tell him this will pass. They insist that one day, his daughter will wake up and be her wonderful old self, only better. According to their calculations this generally happens toward the end of a teenager’s seventeenth year. Far be it from him to rush his once-angelic daughter into adulthood, but sometimes he wishes he could teleport to that magical day in the future when his daughter smiles at him and suggests a family movie night.
“Let’s go then,” he says.
In his mind, he makes a plan: he’ll get Caroline to school, then he’ll do his meeting, and by the time the meeting is over he will have heard from Anna. Of course he will have heard from her. How could it be otherwise?
This is the seventh installment of the serial novella By the Time You Read This. Begin here.
Installments: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
This is Novella, Michelle Richmond’s author newsletter. You are receiving this newsletter because you signed up at some time in the near or distant past on my author website or the Random House website, or more recently on Substack. Thank you for reading. If you like this novella, you might enjoy my story collection Hum, or my most recent novel, The Wonder Test.
Chapter notes: