“Call me Mimsy,” she said. “And don’t worry about it. Just get to work.”
“There’s pickled herring in the nevera,” I said, in Spanish.
“I thought you were Puerto Rican,” said Shorty.
“I am, but my ex-boyfriend was Jewish, and that stuff keeps forever.”
“I thought there were no single men in New York.”
“Exactly the problem,” I said. “His wife was Jewish too.”
“You’re sure I’m not keeping you from your work?” said Shorty.
“What work?” I said forlornly. I had been staring at a blank canvas since ten P.M. “I still have one painting to finish for the show, and I haven’t even started it.”
“Which one?”
“La Rosa del Futuro,” I said. I had the title pinned to the top corner of the frame. Maybe that was what was blocking me. I wadded it up and threw it at the wall. It only went halfway across the room.
“I think that’s the most famous one,” he said. “So you know it gets done. Is there a blossom—”
“A Bud,” I said. “In the door of the fridge.”
“Maybe what you need,” he said, with that shy, sly futuristic smile I was growing to like, “is a little rest.”
After our little rest, which wasn’t so little, and wasn’t exactly a rest, I asked him, “Do you do this often?”
“This?”
“Go to bed with girls from the past. What if I’m your great-great-grandmother or something?”
“I had it checked out,” he said. “She’s living in the Bronx.”
“So you do! You bastard! You do this all the time.”
“Teresa! Mi corazon! Never before. It’s strictly not allowed. I could lose my job! It’s just that when I saw those little…”
“Those little what?”
He blushed. “Those little hands and feet. I fell in love.”
It was my turn to blush. He had won my heart, a guy from the future, forever.
“So if you love me so much, why don’t you take me back to the future with you?” I asked, after another little rest.
“Then who would paint all the paintings you are supposed to paint over the next thirty years? Teresa, you don’t understand how famous you are going to be. Even I have heard of Picasso, Michelangelo, and the great Algarin—and art is not my thing. If something happened to you, the Timeslip would throw off the whole history of art.”
“Oh. How about that.” I couldn’t seem to stop smiling. “So why don’t you stay here with me.”
“I’ve thought about it,” he said. “But if I stayed here, I wouldn’t be around to come back here and meet you in the first place. And if I had stayed here, we would know about it anyway, since there would be some evidence of it. See how complicated Time is? I’m just a delivery guy and it gives me a headache. I need another leaf.”
“Bud,” I said. “You know where they are.” He went into the kitchen for a cerveza and I called out after him: “So you’re going to go back to the future and let me die in the coming holocaust?”
“Die? Holocaust?”
“The one you’re not allowed to tell me about. The nuclear war.”
“Oh, that. Stretch is just trying to alarm you. It’s not a war. It’s a warehouse fire.”