Tom Rachman - The Rise & Fall of Great Powers

But Duncan was shouting upstairs for his wife. “Hail to the chief! Bridget!” No response. “Girls,” he asked, “where’s Mommy?”

They ignored him, gorging themselves.

“Bridget!” he shrieked, calling down to the basement now. “Bridge!”

“Mommy!” one of the triplets cried.

Another added, “Mom-my! You got uh vis-i-tuhhhh!”

Soon all were yelling. Houses with children — Tooly had forgotten about the shouting.

Chloë started dialing her phone.

“Honey,” Duncan told her, “don’t call Mommy. She’s probably just studying upstairs.”

That’s where they found her, earbuds in, which explained her fright when Duncan tapped her shoulder. “Oh jeez, hi,” she said, clasping her necklace. “Why didn’t you tell me your guest got here?” She clipped back her dirty-blond hair, nudged up black-rimmed glasses, and offered a handshake. Tooly would never have put her with Duncan. She was considerably taller, for a start. Not that this precluded a match, but it wasn’t what you expected.

They found the eldest child, Keith (known as Mac), playing Kinectimals on his Xbox 360 in the den. Whenever he moved, it controlled a cutesy puppy onscreen. Though, when you saw the eight-year-old falling on his back, then on his hind legs, it looked rather like the machine was doing the controlling.

“Seriously, Mac, isn’t that kind of a baby game?” Duncan asked.

Chastened, the boy turned it off. Whereas the triplets had traces of Asia in their slender features, with long black hair swishing like prideful little ponies, Mac was a plump boy who shared his mother’s pale Irish-German coloring.

“You didn’t hear us calling?” Duncan said. “We were all calling.”

Mac accepted his bag of chocolates and thanked Tooly, standing barefoot before her, his big toes crossed over each other.

“We’re about to eat dinner,” Duncan said. “You can try them after. Just be patient.”

“Oh, let him have some,” Bridget said.

Duncan counted out just two, then placed them on the table.

Dinner proved raucous, not just owing to the cross-purpose conversations but because of the laptops. Checking email was discouraged at mealtimes but — fortunately for Abigail, Chloë, and Madlen — there was no rule against playing Justin Bieber videos on YouTube. The triplets kept jumping from their seats and setting off new clips.

“Aren’t there nine planets?” Duncan said. “Can someone Google that? Not with your knife and fork, Mac. You’re getting sauce in the frickin’ keyboard, man!”

“I’m not Googling. It’s Wikipedia.”

“How on earth,” Bridget said, “did people find out stuff before Google?”

“The library?” her husband suggested.

“Like on iTunes,” one of the triplets said.

“Not an iTunes library, Maddy,” Duncan told her. “Like an actual library.”

“Whatever, dork ass,” she responded.

The family exploded into laughter, Duncan above all, and Madlen beamed, staring in red-faced delight at each adult in turn.

“Keyboard’s filthy, you guys,” Duncan said. “Let’s try and not total that computer in, like, its first six months of life.”

“How do you spell ‘planets’?” Mac asked.

Bridget answered, “Like it sounds, honey: plan-ets.”

Mac whispered those sounds to himself, typing each letter as if depressing a key might explode something. He read it back, looking to his mother: “P-L-A-N-I-T-S?”

“With an e ,” Duncan said. “She told you: plan- ets .”

“An e where?”

“An e … aargh!” He dropped his spaghetti-spun fork and leaned over to type it himself. Aloud, Duncan skimmed the Wikipedia entry. “Only eight planets now? What the hell? When did that happen?”

Mac wandered away from the table.

“We’re still eating, Mac.”

Tooly helped clear the dishes and, on her second return trip to the kitchen, bumped into the triplets, who were taking turns licking the pasta scoop. “Can I try one of those chocolates I brought you?”

They stood before the fridge door, guarding their bags from her.

“Not even one?” Tooly remembered girls like this from school days — nasty little things in pretty little costumes. To be outfoxed by seven-year-olds again!

Bridget insisted on finishing the cleanup and dispatched Tooly and Duncan to the den, where he flipped among cable news channels.

She could have raised the matter of Humphrey again, but Duncan seemed intent on first asserting his current station in life, as if to efface how he’d been when she knew him. “So tell me more about what you do now,” she said. “I know law, but what, exactly?”

“Transactional-slash-corporate.”

“You slash corporations?”

“The corporations do the slashing. I’m their humble servant. Lots of preparing contracts, setting up stacks of paper for the business folks when they come in for their big meeting. When I’m in the middle of a major deal, I’ll do like a hundred-hour week.”

“You enjoy it?”

“I do, weirdly. Anything is interesting if you look at it long enough. The worst part is the people I’m hired to work for. Not unusual to get a call Friday afternoon from some jerk of twenty-three at a private equity fund going, ‘Sorry, guy, but I need you to spend every minute of your weekend doing this. Need it on my desk nine A.M. Monday.’ ”

Bridget entered. “Is he moaning about making partner?” She patted his thigh, inadvertently knocking the BlackBerry between his legs.

He collected it, reading emails as he spoke: “So, I made partner on schedule in January, right? It’s supposed to be the brass ring after eight years, okay? But now I’m getting shit on just as hard as I ever was. Senior partners still telling me what to do. Haven’t gotten a significant raise.”

“What you’re witnessing,” Bridget said, “is the first time Duncan has been present on a weekend in four months.”

“Oh dear,” Tooly said. “Just as you guys get a break, I turn up and force you to host me.”

“No, no. It’s cool to have guests,” she said. Bridget had also studied law at NYU, but hadn’t worked as an attorney because of the kids. To her delight, she was about to start part-time at a firm on Wall Street, which explained her studying. “It’s piecemeal to start — paid by the hour to sit in a room with a bunch of other contract attorneys, scrolling through a database of millions of emails. But they could order me to do photocopies and I’d be, like, ‘How many?’ Actual conversations with actual grown-up human beings again. Yay!”

Duncan switched to a different news channel. “Yes, yes,” he muttered at the pundits. “Unsatisfied with ruining the economy, you dickweeds are now going to fix the world.”

“He’s not allowed to say things like that around people at work,” Bridget explained. “Hence the ranting at home.”

“Tragically accurate,” Duncan said.

As they sat there, sipping Shiraz, bathed in the light of cable news, Tooly contemplated him. It seemed so improbable that their two bodies had ever had sex. How did people get to that stage, the clothes-pulling part? The whole endeavor struck her as absurd for a moment.

“What’s the smile for?” he asked.

“Just thinking about your old place. With Xavi and Emerson.”

“Right.”

“And Ham the pig downstairs.”

“Hmm.” He returned his attention to the TV, evidently not wanting to discuss the old days.

They insisted that she stay overnight — it was late, and both McGrorys had drunk a bit much to drive her to the station. Duncan showed her to the basement suite, passing a workbench piled with dusty luggage and compact discs.