“Pretending to be French,” Phoebe said, “at a man named Hank’s funeral.”
She said it the way other people said the weather: plain, settled, not up for negotiation.
Somewhere behind her, Joey’s sandwich negotiation had escalated into an actual raised voice, but Phoebe didn’t turn around, and so neither did Mike.
The response that wanted out first was longer than that a whole line of questioning, who’s Hank, why French specifically, was there a body the kind of five-part cross-examination that would’ve made an excellent deposition and a terrible first conversation.
He felt the shape of it start assembling itself and made it small on purpose.
“Why pretending to be French?”
“Because Hank wasn’t dead.”
He waited for the rest of it.
It didn’t come.
She watched him not get an explanation and seemed pleased about that specifically.
“Okay,” Mike said.
“I have several follow-up questions and I’m only going to ask one of them.”
“That’s very restrained of you.”
“I contain multitudes I’m mostly not using today.”
That got the first real laugh out of her, quick and surprised at itself, gone as fast as it arrived.
She recovered by leaning back into the booth and studying him with the pleasure of someone winding up to make something worse on purpose and enjoying the windup.
“I did the whole thing,” she said.
“Fake accent.
Called everyone chéri.
Told his sister the croissants were better in France, which I’ve never been to France, I don’t actually know that, but it felt aggressive in a French way, so.”
“Did it work?”
“Nobody checked.
That’s the thing about a funeral.
Everybody’s too polite to fact-check the French girl.”
“So the plan wasn’t ‘be French.’ The plan was ‘be French at people who’d already decided not to make a scene.'”
Something shifted behind her eyes, quick, gone before it fully landed.
“…Yeah,” she said, slower.
“Yeah, actually.”
“Your turn,” Phoebe said.
“What were you supposed to be doing today, before Joey ambushed you.”
It landed like a fair trade, which it was.
“Practicing,” Mike said.
“I’ve got a thing tonight, a restaurant on Sixty-Third.
Wedding rehearsal dinner, three sets, mostly people who won’t be listening.”
“Do you like that?
Playing for people who aren’t listening?”
“I like the hour before.
Nobody’s asked for anything yet.”
She turned that over like a coin she wasn’t sure was real.
“That’s either the saddest thing I’ve heard today, or the least sad.
I go back and forth.”
“Ask me again after the funeral thing settles down.”
“It’s not going to settle down.
I have a whole song about it.”
Joey reappeared just long enough to lose the sandwich argument, empty-handed and unbothered, already drifting toward the door, restless, like he’d just remembered somewhere better to be.
“Hey, I did this,” he said, pointing between them with real pride, already backing away.
“You’re welcome.
Both of you.
I did this.”
“You really didn’t,” Phoebe said, without looking away from Mike.
“I said the NAME.”
“You said A name.”
Joey was gone, the door swinging shut behind him on a bell that rang too bright for how little anyone had earned it.
It left the two of them with the guitar case, a coffee going cold, and an afternoon that had quietly stopped being anyone else’s business.
Gunther reappeared, patient and unhurried, having long since decided this table was never going to order and come by to be proven right.
“You’re going to want something,” he said.
Not a question.
Phoebe ordered something with three ingredients Mike didn’t recognize and one he was fairly sure wasn’t tea.
Gunther wrote nothing down; he had the look of someone whose memory worked exactly once and charged for repeats.
“And you,” Gunther said to Mike, already braced for the answer to be no, the way he seemed to brace for everything.
“Just a drip coffee.”
Gunther looked at him a beat too long, the way a man looks at a receipt that doesn’t add up but isn’t wrong enough to argue with.
“Drip,” he repeated, like he was writing it down somewhere worse than a notepad, and left.
Phoebe watched him go, then looked back at Mike with something between delight and suspicion.
“That’s it?
In here, with the ” she gestured at the menu board behind the counter, a wall of syrups and modifiers, ” you get the one with no adjectives?”
“I like knowing what I’m getting.”
“That’s very controlling for a guy who just told a stranger he quit his whole career on a feeling.”
He almost had an answer for that a real one, about certainty and choices and the difference between reckless and simple and felt it start assembling itself behind his teeth, gathering length with every half-second he let it sit there.
He cut it down to the size it needed to be.
“Different kind of choice,” he said.
“Coffee’s not supposed to be interesting.
I get enough interesting.”
She considered that like it was worth considering, which, from her, he was already starting to understand was not nothing.
Outside, the light had shifted the particular amount that meant the afternoon was closer to over than either of them wanted to admit yet.
Phoebe checked something on her wrist that wasn’t a watch a beaded bracelet, apparently for scale and made a face.
“I have a four o’clock,” she said.
“Feet, not backs.
I specialize now.
It’s very glamorous, don’t be jealous.”
“I wasn’t.”
“You were a little.” She stood, guitar case already in hand, and looked down at him like she’d already decided the answer to a question she hadn’t technically asked yet.
“Walk me some of the way?”