Rollback

He stopped that train of thought. "Anyway, I knew Bill his whole life, longer than anyone else" — he paused, then decided to finish his sentence with, "in this room," although "in the world" would have been equally true; everyone else who’d known Bill since birth was long gone, and Mike Braeden hadn’t moved onto Windermere until Bill was five.

"Bill didn’t make many mistakes," Don said. "Oh, there were some, including" — and here he tipped his head at Doreen, who seemed to nod in acknowledgment, understanding that he meant things Bill had done in their marriage, not the fact of the marriage itself — "some doozies that he doubtless regretted right up until the end.

But, by and large, he got it right. Of course, it didn’t hurt that he was sharp as a whip." He realized he’d mangled the metaphor as soon as he’d said it, but pressed on. "Indeed, some were surprised that he chose to work in the charitable sector, instead of in business, where he could have made a lot more money." He refrained from glancing now at Pam, refrained from conveying the point that Bill never could have afforded what Don himself had been given. "He could have gone into law, could have been a corporate big shot. But he wanted to make a difference ; he wanted to do good. And he did. My brother did."

Don looked out at the crowd again, a sea of black clothes. One or two people were softly crying. His eyes lingered on his children, and his grandchildren — whose children’s children he would likely live to see.

"No actuary would say that Bill was shortchanged in quantity, but it’s the quality of his life that really stands out." He paused, wondering how personal he should get, but, hell, this was all personal, and he wanted Sarah, and his children, and maybe even God to hear it. "It looks like I might get damn near" — he faltered, realizing he’d just sworn during a service, then went on — "double the number of years my brother did." He looked at the coffin, its polished wood gleaming.

"But," Don continued, "if out of all of that, I can do half as much good, and deserve to be loved half as much as Bill was, then maybe I’ll have earned this… this…"

He fell silent, seeking the right word, and, at last, continued: "…this gift that I’ve been given."

Chapter 35

Don and Sarah went to bed early the night after the funeral, both exhausted. She fell asleep at once, and Don rolled onto his side, looking at her.

He had no doubt the antidepressants Petra had given him were working. He was having a better time dealing with life’s little irritations, and, on a larger level, the idea of killing himself now seemed totally alien — the remembered joke about public speaking aside, not for one second had he wished today to trade places with his brother.

The hormone adjustments were working, too; he was no longer hornier than a hoot owl. Oh, he was still frisky, but at least he felt he had some measure of control now.

But although his lust for Lenore might have abated somewhat, his love had not. That had never been just raging hormones; of that he was sure.

Nonetheless, he had an obligation to Sarah that predated Lenore’s birth by decades; he knew that. Sarah needed him, and although he didn’t need her — not in the sense of requiring her assistance with day-to-day living — he did still love her very much.

Until recently, the quiet, gentle relationship they’d grown into had been enough, and surely it could still be enough, for whatever time they had left together.

And, besides, the current situation was unfair to Lenore. There was no way that he could be the lover she deserved, her full-time companion, her life partner. To break up with Lenore, he knew, would feel like amputation — like cutting off a part of himself. But it was the right thing to do, although—

Although a typical young man losing a young woman might console himself by thinking that there are plenty of other fish in the sea, that someone equally or even more wonderful was bound to come along soon. But Don had lived an entire life already, and in all of it, he’d only met two women who had captivated him, one in 1986 and the other in 2048. The chances of meeting a third, even in the many decades he had left, seemed exceedingly slim.

But that was beside the point.

He knew what he had to do.

And he would do it tomorrow, even though…

No, that didn’t matter. No excuses.

He would do it tomorrow.

The calendar waits for no man, and, as it happened, today, Thursday, October fifteenth, was Don’s birthday. He hadn’t told Lenore that it was coming up; he hadn’t wanted her spending any of what little money she had on a present for him, and now, of course, given what he was pla

And besides, was an eighty-eighth birthday significant, if your body had been rejuvenated? When you’re a kid, birthdays are a big deal. By middle age, they’re given much less importance, with parties only for those that begin new decades, and maybe some moments of quiet reflection when one’s personal clock clicks over to a number ending in a five. But after a certain age, it changes again. Every birthday is to be celebrated, every birthday is an accomplishment… because every birthday might be one’s last — except when you’ve had a rollback. Was his eighty-eighth to be fussed about or ignored?

And it wasn’t as if this automatically meant that his biological age was now twenty-six instead of twenty-five. The twenty-five figure had been a guesstimate, he knew. The rollback was a suite of biological adjustments, not a time machine with digital readouts. Still, he did find himself thinking he was now physically twenty-six, and that was all to the good. Twenty-five had seemed obscenely young; there was something ridiculously insouciant about that age. But twenty-six, why, that was pushing thirty, and starting to get respectable. And even if it were only a guesstimate, he was getting older, just as everyone else did, one day at a time, and those days did need to be bundled together into groups, didn’t they?

Today being his birthday was an unfortunate coincidence, he knew, for he’d be reminded of the end of his relationship with Lenore on each of the many birthdays he still had ahead of him.

He arrived at the Duke of York around noon, and ran into Gabby. "Hi, Don," she said, smiling. "Thanks for joining us at the food bank last weekend."

"No problem," he said. "My pleasure."

"Le

Don nodded and headed off to the little room. Lenore had been reading on her datacom, but she looked up as he approached, and immediately got to her feet, stretching up to kiss him. "Happy birthday, sweetheart!" she declared.

"How — how did you know?"

She smiled mischievously — but, of course, almost all information was online somewhere these days. As soon as they sat down, Lenore produced a floppy package wrapped in metallic-blue paper. "Happy birthday," she said again.

Don looked at the package. "You shouldn’t have!"

"What sort of girlfriend would I be if I missed your birthday? Go ahead, open it."

He did so. Inside was an off-white T-shirt. It had the familiar red barred-circle symbol for "No" with the word QWERTY written as six Scrabble tiles superimposed on it. Don’s jaw dropped. He’d told her the first time they played Scrabble that he disapproved of qwerty being in the Official Scrabble Players Dictionary. In his experience, it was always spelled with all caps, and capitalized words weren’t legal in Scrabble. All dictionaries he’d ever consulted agreed with him about the spelling, save one: a note in Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged, said the term was "often not capitalized." But that same far-too-liberal dictionary said "toronto" was acceptable with a lowercase T when used as an adjective, and the OSPD hadn’t included that, thank God. Since countless tournament-level games had been won using qwerty, nobody wanted to hear that it was bogus. As with Don’s "Gunter" campaign, he’d won few converts.