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would have more respect than this.” She dropped the T-shirts on Ruyu’s lap in disgust, and Ruyu spread them on the table. In black permanent marker and block letters, the writer had written, “To Jake, a future orphan” and “To Lucas, a future orphan,” followed by his unrecognizable signature.
    Perhaps the writer had only meant it as a joke, a sabotaging winkto the boys behind their mother’s back; or else it’d been more than a joke, and he’d felt called to reveal an absolute truth that a child did not learn from his parents. “Unacceptable,” Ruyu said, and folded up the shirts.
    “Now, what do I do with them? I promised the boys I would get them his signature. How do I explain to them that this person they admire is a jerk? An asshole, really,” Celia said, and gulped down some wine as if to rinse away the bad taste. “Thank goodness Edwin picked them up from school so I didn’t have to deal with this until later.”
    Poor gullible Celia, believing, like most people, in a moment called later . Safely removed, later promises possibilities: changes, solutions, rewards, happiness, all too distant to be real, yet real enough to offer relief from the claustrophobic cocoon of now . If only Celia had the strength to be both kind enough and harsh enough with herself to stop talking about later, that heartless annihilator of now. “Exactly what,” Ruyu said, “will you say to them later?”
    “That I forgot?” Celia said uncertainly. “What else can I say? Better for your children to be annoyed with you, better for your husband to be disappointed by you, than break anyone’s heart. I’ll tell you, Ruby, it’s smart of you not to have children. Smarter of you to not want another husband. Stay where you are. Sometimes I think about how simple and beautiful your life is—and that, I say to myself, is how a woman should treat herself.”
    Had Celia been a different person, Ruyu might have found her words distasteful, malicious even, but Celia, being Celia, and never doubting the truth of her own words, was as close to a friend as Ruyu would admit into her life. She unfolded the shirts and studied the handwriting, and asked Celia if she had another pair of white T-shirts. Why? Celia asked, and Ruyu said that they might as well fix the problem themselves. You don’t mean it, Celia said, and Ruyu replied that indeed she did. What’s wrong with borrowing the writer’s name and making two boys happy?
    Celia hesitantly offered another set of T-shirts, and Ruyu asked Celia what message she wanted her children to wear to school.
    “Are you sure this is the right thing to do? I don’t want my children to think I lie to them.”
    The writer, Ruyu wanted to remind Celia, had not lied. “I’m the one lying here,” she said. “Look away.”
    “What if the other kids at school realize that the signatures are fake? Is it even legal to do this?”
    “There are worse crimes,” Ruyu said. Before Celia could protest, Ruyu wrote, in her best approximation of the writer’s handwriting, a message of hope and affection to the beloved Jake and Lucas. After signing and dating the shirts, Ruyu folded them and said she would get rid of the original evidence to spare Celia any wrongdoing.
    A car engine was heard outside the house; another car door opened and then closed. Celia’s guests were arriving, and she assumed the nervous, high-pitched energy of onstage-ness. Ruyu waved for Celia to go and greet her guests. She stuffed the two unwanted T-shirts in her bag, went into the boys’ bedrooms, and placed the ones she’d signed on their pillows.
    The evening’s topic was a recent bestseller written by a woman who called herself a “Chinese tiger mom.” As always the gathering started with the exchange about children and husbands and family vacations and coming holiday recitals and performances. Ruyu drifted in and out of the living room, refilling wineglasses and passing out food, her position somewhere between a