Rainbow Rowell - Landline

“Ten days during which I’ll be in Omaha, Nebraska, celebrating Christmas.”

“Fuck Omaha. Christmas came early.”

“Stop dancing, Seth. Talk to me.”

He’d stopped dancing and frowned at her. “Are you hearing me? Maher Jafari wants our show. Our show, remember? The one we were put on this earth to write?”

“Do you think anybody actually gets put on earth to write TV comedy?”

“Yes,” Seth said. “Us.”

He’d been irrepressible ever since—even when Georgie was arguing with him, even when she was ignoring him. Seth wouldn’t stop smiling. He wouldn’t stop humming, which should probably annoy her. But Georgie was used to that, too.

She looked back up at him now to ask about a Jeff’d Up deadline. . . .

And ended up just looking at him.

He was grinning to himself and typing an e-mail with his index fingers, just to be silly. His eyebrows were dancing.

She sighed.

They were supposed to end up together, Seth and Georgie.

Well, technically, they had ended up together. They’d talked every day since that first day they met.

But they were supposed to end up together-together. Everyone thought it would happen—Georgie had thought it would happen.

Just as soon as Seth exhausted his other possibilities, as soon as he worked through his queue of admirers. He hadn’t been in any hurry, and Georgie didn’t have a say in the matter. She’d taken a number. She was waiting patiently.

And then, one day, she wasn’t.

After Seth headed down to the writers’ room, Georgie decided to try calling Neal again.

He picked up after three rings. “Hello?”

No. It wasn’t Neal. “Alice? Is that you?”

“Yes.”

“It’s Mommy.”

“I know. Your song played when the phone rang.”

“What’s my song?”

Alice started singing “Good Day Sunshine.”

Georgie bit her lip. “That’s my song?”

“Yep.”

“That’s a good song.”

“Yep.”

“Hey,” Georgie said, “where’s Daddy?”

“Outside.”

“Outside?”

“He’s shoveling the snow,” Alice said. “There’s snow here. We’re gonna have a white Christmas.”

“That’s lucky. Did you have a good plane trip?”

“Uh-huh.”

“What was the best part? . . . Alice?” The girls liked answering the phone—and they loved calling people—but they always lost interest once they were on the line. “Alice. Are you watching TV?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Pause it and talk to Mommy.”

“I can’t. Grandma doesn’t have pause.”

“Then turn it off for a minute.”

“I don’t know how.”

“Okay, just . . .” Georgie tried not to sound irritated. “I really miss you.”

“I miss you, too.”

“I love you guys . . . Alice?”

“Yeah?”

“Let me talk to Noomi.”

There was some shuffling, then a thump like somebody had dropped the phone—then finally, “Meow?”

“Noomi? It’s Mommy.”

“Meow.”

“Meow. What are you doing?”

“We’re watching Chip ’n’ Dale.”

“Was Grandma happy to see you?”

“She said we could watch Chip ’n’ Dale.”

“Okay. I love you.”

“You’re the best mommy in the world!”

“Thanks. Hey, Noomi, tell Daddy I called. Okay?”

“Meow.”

“Meow. Tell Daddy, okay?”

“Meow!”

“Meow.” Georgie ended the call, then fidgeted with her phone for a minute, flipping through a few photos of the girls. She hated talking to them on the phone; it made them feel farther away. And it made her feel helpless. Like, even if she heard something bad happening, there’d be nothing she could do to stop it. One time Georgie had called home from the freeway, and all she could do was listen while Alice dropped the phone in her cereal bowl, then tried to decide whether to pick it up.

Plus . . . the girls’ voices were higher on the phone. They sounded younger, and Georgie could hear their every breath. It just always made her realize that she was missing them. Actually missing them. That they kept on growing and changing when she wasn’t there.

If Georgie didn’t talk to her kids all day, it was easier to pretend like their whole world froze in place while she was at work.

She called them every day. Usually twice.

Georgie and Seth and Scotty worked on Passing Time long after dark. They worked until Scotty fell asleep with his head tipped back over the edge of his chair, his mouth hanging open. Seth wanted to leave him like that. “At least we know he’ll be here on time tomorrow.”

But Georgie took pity on him. She poured three packets of Sweet’N Low into Scotty’s mouth, and he woke up sneezing. Then she made him drink half a can of flat Diet Coke to perk him up before he drove home.

She and Seth stayed and stared at the whiteboard for a while after Scotty left. They’d mostly worked on characters today—drawing a sprawled-out family tree showing how everyone on the show was connected, and brainstorming stories that could branch out from each of them.

A lot of what they were doing was just remembering all the ideas they’d come up with over the years, some of which had definitely expired. (Chloe decides to be emo but never figures out what it means. Adam is overly defensive of Monica Lewinsky.) They’d been talking about these characters for so long, Georgie could see them in her head—she could do all their voices.

Seth pulled down a few notecards they’d taped to the wall. “It’s still good, right? Inherently? The show—it’s funny?”

“I think so,” Georgie said. “We’re not moving as fast as we should be.”

“We never are. We’ll get there.”

“Yeah.” She rubbed her eyes. When she looked up again, Seth was smiling his just-for-her smile. It was smaller than the ones he gave everyone else. More eyes. Less teeth.

“Go home,” he said. “Get some sleep. You still look exhausted.”

She was.

So she did.

When Georgie got home, the front door was locked. She fumbled for a minute with her keys.

She’d left a few of the lights on, so the house wasn’t dark—it just felt dark. Georgie realized she was tiptoeing. She cleared her throat. “It’s just me,” she said out loud, to prove that she could.

She tried to remember the last time she’d come home to an empty house, and couldn’t. Not this house.

They’d moved out to Calabasas when Georgie was pregnant with Noomi; their old house, a squat, mint green bungalow in Silver Lake, only had two bedrooms, and there were more tattoo parlors and karaoke bars in their neighborhood than kids.

Georgie missed it. Not the tattoo parlors and the karaoke bars . . . She and Neal never went out much, even before Alice and Noomi. But she missed the house. How small it was. How close. She missed the scrubby excuse for a front yard, and the crooked jacaranda tree that used to drop sticky purple flowers onto her old Jetta every spring.

She and Neal had decorated that house together. They’d gone to the hardware store every weekend for a year to argue about paint. Georgie would always choose the most saturated color on the card.

“You can’t always pick the bottom color,” Neal would say.

“But the bottom color makes all the other colors look dull.”

“You’re looking at them wrong.”

“How is that possible?”

Neal almost always let Georgie win; their house in Silver Lake looked like Rainbow Brite lived there—and you could tell which walls Georgie had painted, because she was lousy at edges and corners.

They both had jobs then. Neal worked weekends. So there were plenty of days and nights when Georgie had their old house to herself. She’d watch TV shows that Neal would never watch with her. (Everything on The WB.) And then, when he got home, he’d climb over her on the couch and bother her until it was time to make dinner.

That was back when Georgie still pretended to help. When she’d hang out in the kitchen with him and drink wine while she watched him slice vegetables.

“You could do this for a living,” she’d say. “You could cut tomatoes in a tomato-cutting commercial, that’s how good you are.”

Then Neal would chop extra loudly and wave the knife over the tomato slices with a flourish.

“I’m serious. You could be an Iron Chef.”

“That or work at Applebee’s.”

Georgie had a regular spot on the kitchen counter, and Neal worked around it. He’d pour her too much wine—and feed her pieces of things before the rest of dinner was ready, blowing on the fork until the bite was cool enough. . . .

How many years ago was that? Eight? Ten?

Georgie dropped her phone and keys onto the coffee table, on a stack of Noomi’s picture books, and wandered into the kitchen. The plate of salmon stir-fry that Neal had made two nights ago was still in the refrigerator. She hadn’t felt like eating it then, even though she’d been starving. She didn’t bother to heat it up now, just grabbed a fork and brought it out to the living room, sitting on the couch and turning on the TV for light. There were two new episodes of Jeff’d Up on the DVR, a rerun and an hour-long Christmas special.

The Christmas special had been a pain in the ass to film. The script had Jeff and Trev both secretly bonding with a stray dog they were pretending to hate. Jeff would kick the dog out of the house, then Trev would let the dog in, then Jeff would go looking for it, trying to sneak it in himself, then he’d get caught and kick it out again. The laugh track had more “aw”s than laughs, and Georgie could tell the sound guy had just used the same “aw” over and over.