Life was a subject on which his daughter collected inspirational quotes. Her favorite—“Life always offers you a second chance. It’s called tomorrow”—served as the bio on her Instagram profile. If asked to describe herself, she invariably said either “fantabulous” or “optimistic.” Among the many items on the third draft of her Christmas list was something called a Happiness Planner, a daily journal designed, she explained, to create positive thinking and personal growth. Christmas was well over a month away, though nearly all the houses on the block already had their lights up.
On a cold morning, the dad sank into the driver’s seat, and in a fog he backed the car down the driveway and into the street before he became aware of a painted wooden sign on top of his dashboard. It was long and thin, with a black background and italicized gold lettering; the paint had been deliberately rubbed away from the sign’s edges to make it look like an heirloom that had once hung in an ancestor’s homestead. Usually this sign hung on the wall above his daughter’s bed, for the most part unnoticed by him, but now, looking at it closely, he saw that its syntax was slightly garbled. It read, Life is always offered a second chance. It’s called tomorrow. Not as bad as what he’d seen in some instruction manuals, but still off, and annoyingly so, considering that the words were the whole point. He flipped over the sign to confirm his suspicions about where it had been manufactured. Proudly made in Michigan, USA, the sticker said. China was off the hook! He didn’t know why he bothered feeling surprised anymore. He tossed the sign into the back seat, facedown. It struck him as darkly symbolic, as so many things did these days. Impersonal life marching on, taking for itself all the tomorrows you had squandered. And don’t get him started on Michigan. How did the unintelligible thing even end up on his dashboard? He’d have to remind Ivy to take it up to her room, or else it would remain in the back of his car for months.
“Do you realize how Snapchat works?” Dorothy asked him, her face lit up in the dark by her laptop. “That it just disappears? The photos they send each other? And that they can write captions on them? Then it all goes poof—like in five seconds it’s gone. So there’s no way of knowing what they’re receiving, or putting out there, what images and messages they’re being exposed to, there’s no way to monitor any of it, because it vanishes…” She clicked on her trackpad. “Hey. Do you know about this?” He rolled toward her and grunted. “Uh-huh.” With his mouth guard in, it wasn’t easy to enunciate. She reached over to the nightstand and then dropped his neoprene eye mask onto his face, saying, “I think I’m going to be up for a little while.” He heaved himself back onto his more comfortable side, the side with the good shoulder, and pulled the mask down over his eyes. Everything disappeared. There was something about being suddenly swaddled in darkness that made each of her clicks seem slightly louder than the one before, as if the source of the sound were coming, very slowly, closer.
The next morning, Dorothy returned from her run bearing a stack of newspapers in her arms, somewhat tentatively, like she was carrying someone else’s baby. She dropped it heavily onto the island. “Since when do we subscribe to The Guardian?” she asked. “And The New York Times?” The dad looked up from his phone in confusion. He did recall making a few late-night donations to the NRDC and the Southern Poverty Law Center, but he’d forgotten all about the newspapers. “You know there’s this thing called a digital subscription,” she remarked as she opened the refrigerator. He moved out of her way. “That’s what I did with The Washington Post,” he said, remembering now. “Because they don’t deliver outside the D.C. area.”
“In a week this place is going to look like a hoarder’s house,” Dorothy predicted. “Piles of newspaper everywhere.”
“I just think it’s important to model,” the dad said, looking meaningfully in the direction of the sofa. “Model where we get our information from.”
He half expected his daughter’s head to pop up like a groundhog’s at the mention of “model.” Kendall Jenner? Gigi Hadid? No, not that kind of model, he heard himself saying wearily over a laugh track.
Dorothy handed him a glass of juice. “Stop looking so pious,” she said. “I agree with you.”
New post: a hand holding a clear plastic Starbucks cup filled with a liquid the color of Pepto-Bismol. In it floated small chunks of something red.
“Do you think this is full of caffeine?” Dorothy asked, her screen tilted in his direction. Though they’d made a reservation, their table wasn’t ready. They stood wedged into the little area by the door where umbrellas would have gone if it had been raining. “Who knows what they actually put in their drinks.”
The door opened, the air was
