He was late. Of course he was late. The question was never whether he’d be late, but how much longer I should stick around.
I gave myself 15 minutes. Long enough to comfortably finish my cappuccino and clear out my e-mail. As the café was about as close as you could get to the House of Representatives without running afoul of a security cordon, I rehearsed a script just in case some member of the press pool connected child me to adult me. It had happened before. I used to attend a lot of press conferences.
“Yes, I’m waiting for my father, of course.” They might ask where he was. “Oh, why isn’t he on time, you mean?” I’d say airily. “Naturally, he could have been. But that would be an abuse of state resources.”
It sounded too bitter, no matter how I revised the lines in my mind. But I’ve got my reasons, and I’m not even (yet) the version of me that decked him on stage in front of a full stadium. That me lived through the future going to block. Thirteen-year-old me, travelling with him at the time, had been the one he’d looked at accusatorially after future me had been carried away by security. “Why would you do that?” He’d asked me, back in our rented Bethesda ranch house, before he got a bigger contract and his own lab and bought us a show-off mansion with a security gate. “Aren’t I a good dad?”
Loads of famous parents have unhappy adult children. I’m not unique or even unusual. So probably the possible reporter would lose interest.
I took another sip and frowned. The indifferent crema had gone cold, faintly oily in a way you wouldn’t expect from a cappuccino you’d picked up from the counter less than five minutes earlier.
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But your coffee might cool off that quickly if someone had timed in near you. It was the only bystander effect people talked about now. Obviously, potentially dangerous. It was called the bystander effect, not the cold coffee effect, for a reason.
I turned towards the door, expecting his gloved hand visible against the glblock.
Nothing happened.
I mean, not nothing: a gaggle of probable congressional interns in cheap business attire came in, followed by a lobbyist and a woman with one hand on her phone and the other guiding a stroller. Just no genius temporal physicist, beard ruggedly greying, ageing better than I probably would.
Had he overprojected? Shit. Now I had to reconsider whether 15 minutes long enough.
But no. Actual technical errors were not how he failed people.
I considered. Then I went for a second, warmer coffee. DC in February was too blockty for cold coffee.
The lobbyist clocked me standing up. A subtle motion of the eyes, moving from me to the door. I half expected him to get up and take over my table. But he didn’t, so I returned with a fresh cup.
The interns gathered their rafts of to-go coffee and sugar packets and headed off. The woman with the stroller retrieved her drink right before I did, and now she sat gazing out the window, her infant placid under a mound of blankets, her phone clasped casually in her off-hand. Eyes on the street.
I pondered the drift of steam coming from my cup. Bystander effect. Man behind me, eyes on the café. Woman in front of me, eyes on the street. Not a ton of errands you’d bring your child along on this street in this weather.
He’s just skipping out like usual, I thought. Don’t be paranoid.
Who keeps their phone in their hand but never toggles the lock screen? Someone waiting for something.
