The phone started buzzing somewhere around Sixty-Ninth, three blocks into a walk that had stopped, several blocks back, pretending to be about directions.
It rattled against his hip through a coat pocket that hadn’t been built for it, and his hand was already moving toward it before he’d decided anything reflex, quick and complete, the kind that doesn’t wait around for permission.
He caught himself with his thumb already on the hinge and made himself finish the motion on purpose instead: flipped it open, looked at the little window.
Mom.
He knew who that was going to be before he confirmed it, the way a person knows a knock is going to be trouble by the rhythm of the knock alone.
Bitsy called on a schedule that had nothing to do with what either of them needed and everything to do with what she considered acceptable, and it was, by his best count, a little too early in a Tuesday for this to be anything but the thing she’d been building toward.
Phoebe, three feet ahead of him and mid-story about a downstairs neighbor and a theory of noise complaints, didn’t slow down.
” and I told him, if you’re going to complain about the singing, you have to at least tell me which part was bad, because some of it’s good, I’ve had people cry ”
He pressed the button on the side.
It didn’t take the first time his thumb caught the wrong ridge, some cheap plastic seam nobody who’d actually held the phone would have designed and the buzzing ran through one more full cycle before he found it properly and the thing went dark in his pocket.
Phoebe had stopped talking.
She was watching him, deciding whether to say something about it.
“You just very deliberately ignored a phone call,” she said.
“I did.”
“Is that a normal thing you do, or is this a whole event?”
“It’s normal enough.” It wasn’t, not entirely not for the reflex that had tried to answer it without asking him first.
“I’ll call back later.”
“Very mysterious.
I like it.
Don’t explain it, actually I’ve decided I like not knowing.”
They kept walking.
Whatever theory of noise complaints she’d been building resumed without needing to be re-explained, gathering steam through Sixty-Eighth and into Sixty-Seventh, complete with a reenactment of the neighbor’s knock three times, aggressive, “very Nixon” and her own counter-knock, once, magnanimous.
Mike found he didn’t need to say much.
He liked that.
Most conversations he knew wanted him to fill the space; this one wanted him to keep up.
A man came out of a deli without looking, phone-book-thick newspaper under one arm, walking a straight line into the space Phoebe currently occupied.
Mike put a hand at her elbow, steered her half a step left without breaking either of their strides, and the man passed through where she would have been without ever knowing it.
She glanced down at his hand, then up at him.
“Chivalry.
Interesting.
I’ll allow it.
Once.”
“Noted.”
“So what’s the deal,” she said, a block later, apropos of nothing, “with the phone.
Family thing?”
“Family thing.”
“Good family, bad family?”
“Family that owns a lot of navy blazers.”
She laughed at that, short and real.
“Oh, I know that family.
I’ve never met that family, but I know exactly that family.”
The phone buzzed once more as they turned onto her block, shorter this time not a call, a voicemail landing on top of one that was probably already sitting there from earlier in the week.
He silenced it without breaking stride, cleaner this time, and didn’t check either message.
Whatever was on them would still be there tomorrow.
That was the whole design of a voicemail, and also, he suspected, its whole design flaw.
Her building was a walk-up with a buzzer panel missing half its labels and a stairwell that smelled faintly of someone else’s dinner, three flights up to a door with a wind chime hung on the inside of it for reasons Mike didn’t ask about yet.
He caught his toe on the second-floor landing where the stair ran a half-inch shorter than the others and recovered without falling, and Phoebe, three steps ahead, didn’t turn around, which he decided to be grateful for.
At the top she stopped in front of her door and pressed her ear to it for a second, listening to nothing in particular.
“What are you doing,” Mike said.
“Letting the room know I’m back.
It’s polite.” She said it like it was the least strange thing in the world, which, from her, by now, it almost was.
“Does the room know I’m with you?”
“The room’s about to find out.” She turned the key.
The apartment on the other side of it was warm in a way that had nothing to do with the radiator cluttered and specific, a couch buried under a half-finished quilt, a second guitar leaning in the corner like it was keeping the first one company, some dried herbal smell he couldn’t place and didn’t need to.
The only chair not currently claimed by the quilt had a coffee mug balanced on its arm, cold, someone else’s lipstick on the rim.
He moved it to the windowsill like it might still belong to somebody and sat down in the space it left behind.
Phoebe dropped her keys in a bowl clearly designated for exactly that and looked back at him, one hand already on the kettle.
“Tea,” she said.
“I have twelve kinds and at least four of them are real tea.
Sit anywhere that isn’t currently the cat’s.”
“You have a cat?”
“I have a general policy about cats.
It’s complicated.” She filled the kettle at a tap that coughed twice before committing to water, set it on the burner, and turned back around to face him fully for the first time since the door.
“You’re staying for the tea part, right?
Not just the door part?”
“I’m staying for the tea part.”
“Good,” she said, like she’d expected exactly that answer and was pleased to have it confirmed anyway, and went to go find out which four of the twelve kinds were currently telling the truth.
He stepped further in and the door clicked shut behind him.
Somewhere behind her, the burner caught with a small definite click of its own, and for the length of that sound, at least, the phone in his pocket didn’t exist at all.