The Plus One

by Sarah Archer

  “A—a thing,” she began. “When you talked about Andre having a thing tonight, I just remembered. I have a thing tonight.”

  “What kind of a thing?”

  “A family thing. It’s, uh, my nieces’ birthdays. They’re turning three.”

  “Don’t toddlers usually have daytime birthday parties?”

  “They’re really mature toddlers. Bertie already drinks coffee.”

  “Wow, that sounds—not safe.”

  “Their mom’s part Italian. I should probably get going, though.” Kelly made a show of checking the time on her phone. “I didn’t realize it was so late.”

  “Oh, okay.”

  “I’ll see you tomorrow, okay? Say hi to Andre for me!”

  She turned and walked away so she didn’t have to watch Priya’s face fall.

  * * *

  • • •

  At home that night with Ethan, no coffee-drinking Italian toddlers in sight, Kelly was contemplating their typical Sunday night options: going out, ordering in, or scrounging together a smorgasbord from within the cupboards. But she thought back to Priya’s question about whether or not Ethan could cook. Of course he could cook. He could do anything.

  As she called him into the kitchen, she was already instinctively pulling up Google on her phone, but then decided that if Ethan was going to be the head chef, it would be better to let him source a recipe. Plus, not having to touch her phone while cooking would keep both her hands and her phone cleaner. “Hey,” she said when Ethan walked in. “What do you feel like eating?”

  After he scanned the internet, they settled on chicken pot pie, a nostalgic standby from her childhood, before Diane’s cooking became so adventurous. At first it was fun as they made a game of it, Kelly racing around the kitchen, pulling out all the ingredients while Ethan shouted them out to her in a mock panic. “Carrots! Carrots, woman!”

  She plunged her arm into the crisper. “Three, two—got the carrots!” She retrieved them, breathless, just in time.

  But once they started actually cooking, Kelly found herself increasingly uncomfortable at not having control over the recipe. “Next we need to brown the chicken,” Ethan said.

  “And then what?” she asked. “I have to know everything that’s in the recipe first.”

  “I can read you the whole thing,” he answered, “but I’ll just have to reread each step as we go.”

  “Oh—fine, then, let’s start with the chicken,” she grumbled, grabbing a pan. Not seeing everything in front of her, having to rely on Ethan to read her the steps, was making her almost physically itch. “What if there’s a step later that I should do first? Like what about preheating the oven? Isn’t that a thing that people do when they’re cooking?”

  “I already did it,” he said. “Don’t worry, if we miss a step, I will take full legal responsibility.”

  “Fine, fine.” She dripped some oil into the pan, willing herself to let go.

  As they went on, they fell into a rhythm together. Kelly relaxed. She got used to trusting Ethan’s voice to be her eyes. The world didn’t fall apart. They made a recipe together, and she actually had fun.

  Kelly wasn’t sure how long the bag of flour had been sitting in her cabinet, but it had definitely never been opened before. She ripped it open now and it exploded, misting her face and chest in white powder. She shrieked.

  “You look like Scarface,” Ethan laughed.

  “It’s in my eyes!”

  “Here, hold still,” Ethan said.

  Obediently, she halted, eyes closed, face upturned to him. He brushed off her cheeks and nose and lips, his hands warm and sturdy, his thumbs ever so gently dusting the powder from her closed lids. Under his touch, Kelly suddenly felt herself shiver.

  “What’s the matter?” he asked.

  “Nothing,” she said. She hoped as she turned away from him that any remaining powder would mask the pinkness in her cheeks.

  fourteen

  • • • • • •

  While Kelly didn’t envy other Silicon Valley companies their rock-climbing walls and nap dens, she would have gladly taken their top-of-the-line dining facilities, with sushi stations and rotating food trucks. But of course, Anita Riveras did not deem such frivolities a wise use of her budget. Her employees would eat their plastic-tray cafeteria standards and be grateful. Kelly and Priya made do, though. They had their lunch routine so down pat that it looked like a Rockettes number. When they sat down together that Monday, they automatically began trading salad toppings—Priya took all the red onions and hard-boiled eggs, Kelly all the tomatoes and croutons. Kelly poured on half a packet of ranch, Priya half a packet of balsamic, then they swapped and finished them off.

  Kelly was so used to the custom that she could have done it with her eyes closed, which today, she might as well have done. Her eyes were locked on her phone, reading an Onion headline that Ethan had sent her: “Latest Update Turns All iPhones into Pumpkins at Midnight.” She chuckled, imagining Ethan at home on the couch, laughing at the same thing. She felt a little spark now every time he texted her during the workday on the phone that she had bought him—these moments were in delicious neon color when the rest of the day was in sepia. She didn’t even notice that Priya hadn’t spoken.

  “How was your night, Priya? Great, Kelly,” Priya said finally.

  “Great,” Kelly echoed.

  Priya set down her fork with a clatter. “Hello!” she cried.

  That got Kelly to look up from her phone. “Hi, hello,” she responded.

  “You have boyfriend syndrome,” Priya announced with finality.

  “What’s that, syphilis?”

  Priya rolled her eyes. “You have this great new boyfriend, so now you’re neglecting your friends. Friend. Me.”

  Kelly had to admit that she was right. She could feel it herself—even when she was with Priya, she wasn’t fully there. “I’m sorry,” she said. Apologizing was getting a bit easier since she’d practiced it with Ethan. “You’re right, I know, I know.” She clicked the Lock button on her phone. “So. You. How was dinner with Andre?”

  “Good, tequila, tacos, tequila, more tequila, not really sure what happened after that. But I woke up today in a good mood.”

  “Speaking of boyfriend syndrome.” Kelly grinned.

  “How was the baby party?”

  “Good,” Kelly lied. “As much of a party as you can have with two-year-olds.”

  “I thought you said they were turning three.”

  “Right,” Kelly said a little too quickly. She swallowed hard on a crouton, her throat suddenly dry as she gulped it down. “They’re all three now.” She cursed herself for having invented a story she would be required to stick to any time the girls came up in the future.

  “Right,” Priya said. She didn’t say anything more.

  Clearly Priya could tell that Kelly wasn’t telling the truth. Kelly raced in to fill the silence. “But, um, how’s the arm coming?” Priya was currently building a delicate mechanical arm for use in surgeries. The fact that Priya’s Medical Engineering department was not participating in the competition for investor funding made hearing about her work a nice distraction from Kelly’s own.

  “It’s coming,” Priya replied. “I’m looking at this new 3-D imaging system . . .”

  Priya didn’t mention the weekend again. But there was a strained quality to her voice as she talked on, like she was holding something back. Something was broken in the girls’ normal easy dynamic, like one of the Rockettes was off by a beat.

  * * *

  • • •

  There were only six words in Diane’s text later that week: “We need to talk about Ethan.” There was also a boat emoji at the end, which Kelly had to assume was either a mistake or a shy admission of her mother’s hitherto undisclosed lifelong dreams of becoming a mariner. Kelly had misse
d the text that afternoon at work while she was in a marathon coding session. But now, halted at a stoplight, the sky lit up with that peculiar reflective quality of a cloud-filled dusk, she saw it. She only had one idea of what those six words could mean: her mother knew something about Ethan that she wasn’t supposed to know. She tried calling, but her mom didn’t answer. She flipped her blinker and crawled toward the other lane against the honking of the surrounding cars. She wasn’t going home. She was going home.

  But when she jolted into her parents’ driveway twenty minutes later, braking hard, she was surprised to see only her father’s car there. And sure enough, when she walked in, it was only Carl in the semilit kitchen, shoveling a Domino’s pizza into his face like wood into a chipper.

  “Hey, Dad. Is Mom out?” she asked.

  “She’s at some bridal vendors industry mixer,” he said, or it sounded like that’s what he was trying to say around the food. “Want some pizza? It’s this or gambling on leftovers.”

  Kelly slid onto a stool next to her dad and morosely took a slice, but she wasn’t sure she could eat. Even pizza didn’t sound appetizing in the face of her welling anxiety.

  “What’s wrong?” Carl gurgled through the pizza.

  “Why would you assume something’s wrong? It’s not like I only come over when there’s a problem. There’s family dinners and—” Kelly broke off. Yes, the only other time she came over was when there was a problem. “I just wanted to talk to Mom. Did she seem—normal earlier today?” She was trying to probe the issue as delicately as possible, not revealing more information to her dad than she needed to.

  “Has she ever been normal?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “She was in a good mood, if that’s what you’re asking,” Carl said. “She was humming that Dirty Dancing song.”

  Kelly supposed that was a positive sign. “(I’ve Had) The Time of My Life” always meant that Diane was pleased about something, usually either a large sale at the shop or a picture revealing cellulite on a beautiful celebrity. She tried probing a little harder. “I just got a weird text from her about Ethan.”

  “Oh, yeah, she said something about that.” Carl held up a finger, taking his sweet time to masticate a tennis-ball-size bite of pizza while Kelly’s blood pressure hovered somewhere around the Milky Way. Finally, he finished. “She wants his measurements.”

  “Measurements?” In her panicked state of mind, Kelly immediately wondered if this was some reference to Ethan’s specs.

  “For a tuxedo. She and Clara wanted to put him in the wedding party.”

  “Oh. Oh.” Diane wanted to include Ethan in the wedding party. Kelly could breathe again. She recovered herself enough to pull some soy sauce from the cabinet and lean against the island, sprinkling it artfully on her slice of pizza. “That’s really nice of them, I guess,” she admitted. She knew that including Ethan less than two weeks out from the ceremony would involve some rearranging, which meant it was a major gesture from her mom. Suddenly she felt ravenous. She tore down the pizza in a few bites. She was ready to cheerfully pick up her purse and leave, but realized she had just had an entire conversation with her father that was only about her mother. She turned to look at him in the semigloom of the kitchen.

  “How are you doing? How’s work?” she asked.

  “Same old, same old.” His hand twitched toward a sheaf of diagrams before him on the countertop, as if he were ready to get back to it.

  “Didn’t you install a whole new pressure monitor recently?”

  “Sure did.”

  “My work’s been crazy,” she tried, already feeling herself starting to ramble awkwardly. “I’ve just never been in charge of a whole project like this before. I guess I didn’t realize how hard the big-picture, conceptual stuff is. Not that the detail work is easy, either. I just wish I had more hours in the day. We can build a robot that looks like a human but still no time machine, right?” She laughed.

  “Yeah, that’s tough,” Carl responded. And that was it. Kelly’s frame sagged. Here in this house, in this moment, she felt as if she were once more a little girl, waiting for her brilliant engineering father to get home from work so she could show him the Speak & Spell she’d reprogrammed, falling asleep on the couch until he finally came in, leaping up to greet him, hearing him tell her that he was tired and he’d look at it another time, though he never did.

  “I guess I should get going,” she said abruptly. Something of what she was feeling must have read in her face, because Carl stirred.

  “I—” he began. I dealt with something similar at work? I’m proud of you? I’m sorry? Instead, he stared at the grease-spattered pizza box, pushing it toward her. “You want another slice?” he asked gruffly.

  “No, I’m good.” She slipped on her purse and patted him on the arm on her way out of the kitchen. “Have a good night.” Maybe she had gotten more from her dad than her scientific mind.

  * * *

  • • •

  It was pouring on Kelly’s drive home. Traffic crawled with California drivers who looked at rain like a biblical plague. She staggered upstairs once she reached her apartment, ready to collapse indoors and settle in for a sheltered, vegetative night with Ethan. But it was just as she walked into a dark, silent apartment that he called to let her know he was stuck on the other side of town. He had been out buying groceries for that evening—cooking together had become a new part of their nightly routine, and he had taken to surprising her with spiny fruits from Japan, artisanal flours, and once, a rather melancholy whole fish. Tonight, though, it was not to be, as his bus had broken down in traffic and he was moored until the scientists of San Jose determined that the water from the sky would not, in fact, dissolve them.

  Kelly bucked up, buoyed by the idea of having her own single lady’s night. After all, she hadn’t had the run of the apartment for a while now. She would . . . well, she would do whatever it was she used to enjoy doing before Ethan was around. Except she couldn’t think of anything appealing, actually; he saw it all anyway, the ghastly face masks, the midnight sundaes, and the soulful warbling of Selena Gomez songs. But maybe it would be nice just to have a quiet night to herself.

  The trouble was, it was too quiet. The low, monotonous buzz of the refrigerator grew grating. As Kelly wandered between the kitchen, looking for something to eat without feeling hungry, and the living room, looking for something to watch on the TV without being interested, the passing of her own reflection in the black window spooked her.

  When she climbed into bed that night, she was acutely aware of the stretch of space on either side of her. Even though Ethan always slept on the couch in the next room, the knowledge that he was tucking in at the same time as her somehow made it feel as if she weren’t sleeping alone. Now, she felt as solitary as an obelisk in a desert, sand-stung and unknowable. It was incomprehensible to think that this had been her daily existence only a month before. And that in a couple more weeks, after the wedding, it would be her life again: an endless alternation between breakfast for one and dinner for one, her thoughts growing stale without anyone to share them with, stepping between her own silences.

  As aware as she was that there were other men in the world besides Ethan—actual men—the thought of going back to being single felt like a permanent decree. She reckoned that the data of her dating history could not exactly be extrapolated with any view to future success. And it was a statistical impossibility that she would ever find another man as right for her as Ethan, who had been designed specifically as her perfect match. He fit all of her stipulations to a T. No one else could ever make her as happy. Right?

  Kelly rolled over and scrunched deeper into her pillow, until the chink of a key in the latch told her that Ethan was finally home. She leaped out of bed and emerged into the living room in time to see him shut the door and turn around. He reached out a hand to flip the light on, but she sto
pped him. “Don’t,” she said. He was soaked from the walk home from the bus stop, and, backlit by the streetlamp’s light streaming in through the window, the edges of his damp, dark hair held a thousand tiny points of light. His frame was a tall black silhouette, wonderfully solid, wonderfully real.

  Without thinking, she rushed forward and threw her arms around him. “Kelly,” he began with surprise, but she leaned in, holding him tighter, and felt his arms encircle her, their weight grounding and centering her. His back was warm under his wet shirt.

  That night, as Kelly lay in her bed, she kept her eyes trained on Ethan even as her lids fluttered to a close. If she tucked her head just right, she could see the peaks and valleys of his sleeping form in the next room.

  fifteen

  • • • • • •

  At this point in Confibot’s development, with less than two months to go until the presentation, Kelly was supposed to be much further along. The schedule she had carefully blocked out on the wall of her cubicle at the beginning of the project with colored Post-it notes, their edges perfectly aligned, indicated that she should be well into blue by now, and instead she was firmly mired in red. Confibot was essentially built, and while some of his major functions, like telecommunication with doctors and family members, were still under construction, Kelly got a thrill seeing the skeletal beginnings of the outcome she had envisioned: a truly comprehensive caregiver robot. But he was still basically an it. She had hoped that the mountains of research she had collected on interpersonal interactions would come together to present, like invisible ink surfacing under a flame, a clear profile of what Confibot’s face should look like and what expressions he should make with it, what his voice should sound like, and what he should say with it. Instead, the more research she did, the more confused she got. One article said that 62 percent of women over thirty identified closed-mouth smiles as “friendly” in photographs. But in AHI’s focus groups, 89 percent of users had gone for teeth-baring smiles in the simulations.