Page 67 of Ideal Life

As she pulled into the parking lot, she asked Sam to hand her her phone from the glove compartment.

He passed it over without looking at the screen.

There was no message from Erin, gushing over Libby and Jacob being pregnant.

Whew.

“I’m glad we got to hang out, Tal,” Sam said, opening the passenger door. “I missed you.”

“Same. Good luck at the Summer Million tournament.”

He crossed the parking lot toward the lighthouse, but before he got there, he turned back and waved again. Not mad.

All right, maybe she’d broken her promise to him again, changed things a tiny bit.

But it’s innocuous, she thought, so it’s fine.

Sam

The mail had arrived while Sam was out. Kenneth had already taken what was addressed to the bookstore and had left Sam’s personal letters and packages in his office.

Sam settled into his desk and flipped through the stack of mail, tossing most of it—ads for junk he didn’t need—into the recycling bin. But when he got to a slim brown paper package, he tore into it eagerly.

Three sets of wireless earbuds tumbled out onto his desk. They’d been a pricey investment, but he hoped they’d be worth it. They were the ones that could provide real-time translation.

Hands shaky, he ripped open the packaging on one set and popped them into his ears, at the same time pulling up YouTube on his computer. After pairing the earbuds with the laptop and following the instructions to set up automatic, real-time translation, Sam hit Play on a Spanish-language video about book binding. (He had auto-dubbing turned off).

On-screen, the woman’s mouth was making the shapes of Spanish, but the words streaming into Sam’s earbuds—in her voice—were flawless English.

“Whoa,” he said.

But Spanish was a very popular language and relatively easy to translate. What about something harder, like… Finnish?

He searched for a video about a random topic—“best books in Finnish”—and watched as the same thing happened. On-screen, the very blond man’s mouth moved in shapes that were clearly not English, and yet, his voice came in through the earbuds in clear and perfect English.

Sam tried a video on Libby and Jacob’s channel, where they visited a Moroccan souk. They spoke in English while in the background, the market vendors spoke Moroccan Arabic, a couple of Berber languages, and French. The earbuds translated all of them seamlessly in English with only a fraction of a second of lag, and all in the speakers’ original voices. Sam watched the video again, at times without the earbuds and at times with, just to double-check that the video hadn’t actually all been in English already.

He found a video in Taiwanese and confirmed that the earbuds could handle that, too.

Then he flipped the settings and watched a video in English, while having the earbuds translate the speech into Taiwanese.

It worked.

By the time Jenny and Roger walked in the door of Lighthouse Books after a day of touring Fisherman’s Wharf, Sam was practically ricocheting off the shelves, waiting to try the earbuds with them.

And yet, when his mom asked how his day had been, he hesitated. What if the earbuds worked well with videos but not as smoothly with real people?

Or… what if they worked as well as Sam hoped?

For his entire life, his relationship with his parents had been one of respect and love, but in a distant, polite way. What happened when this tech suddenly tore down those walls, those well-worn, learned paths for interacting?

How did a person handle having the ability to be close to someone if they’d always been most comfortable being far?

But then Sam thought about how close Talia and Libby were, and how he’d always envied it. And how Talia had also reconnected with her parents in the last couple of years, after decades of their negligence. Even with that tension in their history, she’d been happy with this new, stronger version of her family. And Sam’s parents were nothing like Talia and Libby’s; it had only been language and an ocean that had kept them apart.

“Here—I bought something.” Sam led his mom and dad up to his apartment, then handed each a set of earbuds.

“We already have,” Roger said. “Not same. But already have.”