This Time Tomorrow

by Emma Straub

It was the worst fact of parenthood, that what you did mattered so much more than anything you said.

Her father had had good friends. But they were also men, and men weren’t trained to be in charge of their own friendships.

For all of her twenties and thirties, Alice had believed that she would have children someday, until she didn’t anymore. It was like balancing a bowling ball in the middle of a seesaw. There were people who were so sure, one direction or the other, and then there were people like her, who had never really decided until one day they stopped paying attention and then got knocked sideways. One of the actors from The Odd Couple had had a baby when he was seventy-nine years old. Men never had to decide a thing.

Women could say anything to her, and she would smile—if a man had said it, Alice would have scowled and crossed the street.

anything, she understood that it wasn’t actually something one could ever work all the way through, like a jigsaw puzzle or a Rubik’s cube; grief was something that moved in and stayed. Maybe it moved from one side of the room to the other, farther away from the window, but it was always there. A part of you that you couldn’t wish or pray or drink or exercise away.