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: : : JAKOB’S NEVER BEEN EXACTLY SURE what to call Freya's mom. Her name is Anne, but calling her Anne always seems too informal; even though Jakob's now thirty he's still thinks of people substantially older than him as adults, and mostly he's used to calling adults Ms. This or Mr. Whatever. But to call her Ms. Pollard seems too formal, and he distinctly remembers that when he called her this in the past she pish-poshed it. Mostly he thinks of her as Freya's mom and tries to avoid calling her anything at all.
—So, Jakob, says Freya's mom, chopping up potatoes. —What have you been up to lately?
Jakob spends some time groping around in his head for a good response, and ends up saying something like, oh, the same. Freya's mom nods as though he's answered her question, and he nods along with her and says yeah, pretty much.
Really he doesn't have a good answer. The last big piece of news was back in September, when he moved in with Freya, and the last big piece of news before that was when he got hired to work in the Human Resources department of Fieldhammer Investments, the place where he'd been working as a temp. But Freya's mom already knows those things. What he's been up to, really, is going in to work, looking over resumes, helping to schedule interviews, surfing the Web in his office, then going home and hanging with Freya, one of them cooks dinner, the other one washes the dishes, then they settle in to watch a movie or read books. It's not that bad of a time, really, and it's nice not to have to waste time trekking across town with an overnight bag anymore, and there are even times when he has begun to think I could do this for the rest of my life, but he's certainly not ready to articulate that particular detail, and otherwise, in terms of what he's been up to lately, there's just not that much to say. In the name of making conversation he talks a bit about a project he's been assigned to at work, in a broadly generalized way so as to avoid entangling poor Ms. Pollard (“Anne”) in the entire Byzantine snarl of power games that inevitably (Jakob has learned) contribute any number of unpredictable complications to every Fieldhammer project. Unfortunately, the power games are also just about the only interesting thing about the project, so leaving them out makes the story kind of dry. Fortunately, Freya's mom has some awesomely deep reserve of enthusiasm for any words that manage to dribble their way out of Jakob's mouth, and so even though he utterly mangles his attempt to sketch out a picture of the zeitgeist of the human resources industry, she ornaments it with enough bright uh-huhs and reallys that by the time he's exhausted what he has to say about it he actually feels like he might have made it sound passably interesting.
In the living room Freya's dad is watching the football game by himself.
Upstairs, Freya and Tim sit on Tim's bed, playing Metroid Prime. Tim's way better than she is, and so she's been sitting there watching him play for maybe twenty minutes straight, and although for a while the business of watching the sci-fi world unfold itself on screen was kind of enjoyable she's started, now, to get pretty bored. She's half-considering breaking Tim's concentration by just pushing him over and pounding him in the arm.
Instead she decides to play it straight. —Hey, she says. —I'm bored.
Tim keeps looking at the screen. —So? he says.
—So I'm going to go downstairs, she says.
—OK, Tim says.
Freya frowns. Really she'd hoped that Tim might say oh, I'll come down with you or something like that, something that would indicate that he felt like he'd rather spend time with her than play some stupid videogame. After all, he only sees him, what?, maybe four or five times a year? And he can play videogames any time he wants. —You coming? she says.
—In a minute, he says. —When I lose this guy.
—Come on, Freya says, and she grabs his ear.
—Ow, fuck, Tim says, and he angles his elbow up into her stomach, while keeping his hands on the controller. —Get off.
—Fine, Freya says, and she lets go of his ear only to slap him, hard, on the exposed back of his neck. Tim winces but doesn't take his eyes off the screen. She leaves him to it and starts heading downstairs. Jakob's there at the bottom of the staircase.
—How's everything up there? he says.
—You know, she says. —Normal.
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