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I glanced at Rod.

Rod was not okay.

He was leaning against the prep counter with his arms crossed and his jaw set. His kind eyes had gone genuinely, unmistakably wet, and when he caught me looking, he cleared his throat and stared hard at the ceiling like a man reading an exit sign in a burning building.

“Rod?”

“I am fine,” he mumbled.

“Are you . . . crying?” I asked.

“It was good machine,” he said. His voice cracked clean down the middle on “machine.” Something in my chest lurched, because Rod Silva was the steadiest man I’d ever met, a professional who’d stood in the heat of a real kitchen and not blinked—and he was coming apart over an appliance. “Seven years, Mark, that machine and me. With me every service, every rush. Never quit on me, not once, not until—” He gestured at the towel-wrapped shape on the dolly, unable to finish. He turned away.

Jacks, now beside him, put a quiet hand on his back.

“That’s why we’re doing this,” Benji said gently.

I understood then, that under the veil and the napkins and the dour dance dirge, Benji had clocked that Rod was actually grieving and had built an entire ceremony so his friend wouldn’t have to grieve alone or feel stupid about it. That’s the thing about Benji. I’d watched Dante do the same thing to me two days before. Apparently it was going around.

“We are gathered here today,” Benji began solemnly.

On cue, Jacks lowered the music to a respectful murmur.

Finn made a sound.

“Out of respect for the fallen,” Benji said, without missing a beat or turning his head.

Finn hushed instantly, chastened and utterly delighted.

“We are gathered to remember Sir Reginald Frost.”

There was a pause.

“Who?” said Jacks.

“The ice machine,” Benji whispered.

“The ice machine’s name is Reginald?” Finn was biting back laughter.

“Sir Reginald, and yes, it always was. You simply never asked.” I don’t think Benji had planned this name. I would have bet the bar on it. He’d invented “Sir Reginald Frost” somewhere between the walk-in and the prep counter and was now prepared to defend his impromptu knighthood to the grave. “He came to us seven years ago, a humble machine in a world that did not yet know his worth. He asked for nothing but water and power and the occasional descaling. He gave, in return, the ice of life, cube after cube after cube, without complaint, without applause—”

He paused, and his eyes found mine. I watched his second impromptu idea arrive.

“—unlike some members of this family who require applause simply to walk down a hallway.”

Here we go, I said to myself.

“I’m not naming names,” Benji intoned.

“You’ve been naming names for four straight days,” Finn muttered. “Speaking of your hallway.” Finn shifted, brightening, because if there is a single thing on this earth Finn loves more than a funeral dirge, it’s watching me suffer. “How’s the search going? The civilized one, on your phone.”

And that was how a funeral for an ice machine became a debrief of my dating life, which, if you’ve ever attended either, you’ll know they are structurally identical events. Grief and gossip breathe the same air. People lean in for both.

“It’s going,” I whispered because, well, it was a funeral, sort of.

“That’s a ‘nope’ voice,” Benji said, all business.

“It’s not a ‘nope’ voice,” I protested.