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“Yes,” I tell him. “And I think Zee needs to listen to it again because he’s completely wrong about it, not to mention that he owes you for uprooting your entire life to join his band. I think you should remind him that he agreed to play your songs, and now he’s going back on his word.”

I can hear Mackenzie sigh long and hard. “It’s fine. I don’t want to fight with him.”

I don’t think it’s fine at all, and I don’t understand why Mackenzie seems so okay with it.

“Well, what about the other guys?” I change my tactic. “Have you played it for them? It’s a band, not a dictatorship.”

I can’t see Mackenzie, but I can feel him shaking his head.

“I just don’t want to be the guy that causes drama. Things are going well right now. The guys are all getting along. We’ve got less than a week before we’re back. It just doesn’t feel like a time to fight.”

Something swells inside me that feels a lot like frustration. I don’t understand why he’s so reluctant to go after something he claims to want so badly.

I close my eyes. When I open them again, something on the paved path a few feet away catches in the sun. I walk over to it and bend down, and once I study it for a moment, I abandon all of my rules about touching things left on the ground in the city and pick it up.

It’s a penny. As I study it in the palm of my hand, I realize it has been awhile since I’ve seen one.

Larry considered pennies to be the ultimate heralds for signs from the universe. He did not share my wariness about picking things up off the sidewalks, and any penny he found while he was out went into his pocket with a declaration that something good was about to happen. He had a big pickle jar in his closet filled with them. And when Canada stopped producing pennies and the sidewalk supply started to dwindle, he’d plant his stash around the apartment, leaving “luck” for me to find. They’d appear on days when I had a big test or a date and sometimes on days where I was just feeling down. I never thought they brought me any sort of supernatural power, but they did bring something far better—a reminder that someone cared about me.

“You know how you believe in signs?” I say to Mackenzie.

There’s a short huff of laughter on his end. “Yeah.”

I hold the penny up to the light. “Well, I just spotted a lucky penny. I think it means your song is something really special. I am going to hang on to it until you get back and keep it safe.”

“Thank you,” he says, and I get the impression he’s talking about more than just the coin. “I have to run. I’m having a drink with Edwin Stark—he’s the lead singer of the Rydells.”

He draws a breath and I almost get the sense he’s going to say something else, but he lets it go in one long exhale. “Maybe I’ll play it for him.”

I like the possibility I hear in his voice. “I think that’s an excellent idea.”

20

My call with Mackenzie gets me through a grueling few days at work. Phillip and I have come to the part of our study where we need to review the notes from our subjects’ counseling sessions. They have all been in a six-week rehabilitation program focusing on managing their addictions. We are comparing their files with their MRI scans to see if their progress or regression can be mapped to their brains.

It involves reading very personal details. Although the files are anonymous, each one shines a light on a life plagued by addiction. The road for most of the patients in our program is rocky. And although there are several successes, many participants are struggling, and there are several others where the patient has dropped the program altogether.

The file in front of me hits a little too close to home. The patient is a single mother struggling with an opioid addiction formed after she was hit by a car and was given painkillers for a broken leg. She is working hard at recovering, but each page of her file paints a picture of two steps forward and one step back.

I worry about her kid. There are no details about them in her file, and yet I still find myself wondering if they have a Larry-like adult who can step in if needed?

It’s an answer I’ll probably never know and one that weighs particularly heavy on me when I finally get home and crash on my couch with a tin of Harmony’s surprisingly delicious butterless butter tarts and A Merry Little Mix-up.

It’s a delightful, cozy movie about an advertising executive who doesn’t believe she needs love and hides behind her ice queen exterior, and a traveling nomad who has never found a place that felt like home. They both accidentally book tickets to Sydney, Nova Scotia, instead of their intended destination of Sydney, Australia, and there’s a winter storm grounding all transportation and a winter festival that’s booked up all the hotel rooms except for one. The characters are beside themselves. She is late for a big presentation with a tuna farmer looking to rebrand, and he is missing the phenomenon of bioluminescent algae of Jervis Bay. But I know that despite logic or logistics or any of the other obstacles that plague reality, they are a single queen-size bed and a well-timed power outage away from the happily ever after they both deserve.

Onscreen, the characters are drinking hot chocolate and making googly love eyes at each other. I’m doing the same in my living room with my iPhone 12, and the text that has just popped onto my screen.

Mackenzie:

Hey. You up? I should be home tomorrow before dinner. The guys are out celebrating tonight. I’d love to get going first thing in the morning, but I don’t think it will happen.

The band is in Buffalo—two short hours away, on the other side of the border. Their month-long tour is done. Their last show ended a few hours ago.

Mackenzie:

It feels like I left Toronto yesterday, but also like I’ve been gone for a year if that makes any sense.

It does.