“It's got all five food groups, if you don't look too closely at any of them.” She bites into the patty melt, triumphant. “That's nutrition.”
“It's beige, Josie.”
That gets her, a quick laugh she ducks into her shake, and I tell myself I'm not keeping track of how easy it is to do that, get a laugh out of her, except I appear to be keeping track anyway.
For a while it's fine.It's almost easy. She tells me about her day, a four-year-old named Atlas who bit a four-year-old named Bodhi, a parent who wants the nap schedule revised by committee, the class fish situation, which is apparently ongoing and tragic.
I don't say much. I'm not built for saying much. But she doesn't seem to need me to, she just talks, and laughs at her own stuff before she gets to the end of it, and somewhere in the middle of a story about a glue incident I notice I've been listening with my whole face, leaning in over a plate of meatloaf like a man with nowhere else he'd rather be, and I sit back so fast the booth creaks.
The trouble is the mouth. She talks with her whole self, and I keep ending up watching her mouth do it, and once or twice when she laughs and ducks her head her scent kicks up warmer across the table and I have to sit very still and run engine displacement figures in my head until it passes.
This was supposed to be a transaction. A booth, a witness, a rumor. Nobody told me I'd spend the whole meal white-knuckling the urge to lean across the meatloaf and find out if she tastes like she smells.
Which is, of course, when Aiden Lee slides into the booth beside me uninvited, still in his scrubs, smelling like the vet clinic and somebody's anal-gland appointment.
“Don't mind me,” he says, stealing one of my fries. “Just witnessing history. Finn Morrow. Out. With a person. Voluntarily.” He looks at Josie with the delighted, dangerous interest of a man who has known me since we were six andhas been waiting twenty-six years for material this good. “Hi. Aiden. His oldest friend, his only friend, the keeper of every embarrassing thing he's ever done. We should get coffee. I'll tell you everything.”
“Josie,” she says, shaking his hand, already too charmed, traitor.
“You're the preschool teacher.” Aiden's grin widens, and I know that grin, that grin is trouble. “He's mentioned you. Not in words. He doesn't have those. But there was atone.”
“There was no tone,” I say.
“There was a documented tone.” He eats another of my fries. “Anyway, I can't stay, Gemma needs the truck, she's got a goat thing.” He makes a face when he says it, which I figure is about the goat, because goats are a menace and Gemma keeps adopting them. “Be good.” He slides back out, points two fingers at me, walks backward toward the door grinning like an idiot. “I'm happy for you, man. Genuinely. It's disgusting.”
He's gone before I can hit him.
“I like him,” Josie says.
“Everyone likes him. It's his whole crime.”
“Gemma's your sister, right? The one with the goats.”
“Little sister. Vet. Collects animals nobody wants and a few nobody asked for.” I drag a fry through ketchup I don't intend to eat. “Aiden's basically a brother. Grew up two streets apart. He's allowed to be insufferable. I'm not allowed to drown him.”
She laughs. I don't, because my brain's still turning overthere was a tone,and there was no tone, and I'm irritated at how many times I've now had to tell myself there was no tone.
“What are you thinking about?” she says.
“Nothing.” Which is such an obvious lie that she grins, and the grin lands somewhere I keep specifically locked, and I reach for my water.
This is the part nobody warned me about. I figured the danger in this arrangement was the touching, the hand-holding, the part where I'd have to act like a man in love in front of a room. I built my whole defense around that. I can hold a woman's hand for an audience. That's choreography. I could do choreography in my sleep.
Nobody told me the dangerous part would be a patty melt and an hour of her talking about her day like I'm somebody who gets to hear it.
Then the bellover the door goes, and my mother walks into Dottie's Diner.
Of course she does. The one night. She's got Marie Hartley with her and a fresh blowout and the radar of a woman who has spent two solid months trying to get me into exactly this booth with exactly any girl, and she stops dead three feet inside the door, and her whole face opens like a garage.
“Incoming,” I say, low. “Don't look.”
Josie looks. Naturally. Everyone always looks.
“Oh no.” Not a question. She knows exactly who's bearing down on us, the same way the whole town does, except she's got two extra reasons to panic, because Cynthia Morrow does her highlights every six weeks and the last time the two of them stood within twenty feet of each other, Josie was lying to her face through a closet door about a sensory table that did not exist. “Finn. We were supposed to let herhearabout this. Secondhand. Safe. Not, not inperson, not tonight?—”
“I'm aware.”
“I know this is the part you actually need, Finn, her seeing us, Iknowthat.” Her voice is climbing anyway. “But she does myhair.And theonetime I had to lie to that woman I nearly combusted on the spot, and I'm fairly sure she's had her eye onme ever since, like she knew I was covering for something. And now she's going to find me sitting in your booth eating a patty melt, which is basically a signedconfession.”
