𝑻𝒉𝒆 𝑨𝒍𝒎𝒐𝒔𝒕

March 9. 23 days left.

He'd borrowed the car from Gerald.

This had required a negotiation. Gerald Feehan did not lend his car. Gerald Feehan's car was a 1991 Toyota Camry the colour of something that had once been silver, and Gerald loved it the way some men loved boats or dogs or their own opinions: totally, unreasonably, with a devotion that exceeded the object's merit.

Fayiz had offered to pay the overdue rent early. Gerald had handed over the keys before he'd finished the sentence.

It was Sunday. Not Tuesday. Not Thursday.

He pulled up outside the diner at 8:00. Mollie was at the door, scarf wound, coat buttoned, reaching for the handle when she saw the car. Saw him. In the car. Not in the booth.

She stopped.

He rolled down the window. The window required physical rolling. Gerald's car predated the concept of automated anything.

"Get in," he said.

"Why are you in a car."

"Because walking to Cape Spear takes four hours and I don't think Theodore's legs are up to it."

Theodore was in the back seat. He had claimed the centre position and was sitting upright with the posture of a dog who understood that the back seat of a Toyota Camry was, in fact, his Toyota Camry. He looked at Mollie through the window. The look said: get in the car. Don't make this difficult.

"Cape Spear," she said.

"The easternmost point of North America. The edge of the continent. The place where the land stops and there's nothing between you and Ireland except water."

"I know what Cape Spear is."

"Then you know it's better than the booth."

She looked at the diner. At the booth, visible through the window, where their cups would be, where Saoirse would be wiping counters, where the crooked clock would be keeping its crooked time. She looked at the car. At Theodore. At Fayiz, who was sitting behind the wheel of a landlord's Camry with paint on his knuckles and an expression that was trying very hard to be casual and was not succeeding.

"You're kidnapping me," she said.

"I'm expanding the venue."

"The contract says breakfast."

He reached across and opened the glovebox. Inside were two takeaway cups from The Classic... coffee and tea, still warm-and a paper bag that contained, she would discover, two orders of pancakes and toast, wrapped in foil, packed with the conspiratorial assistance of Saoirse, who had slid them across the counter that morning with the expression of someone aiding a heist.

"Breakfast," he said.

She stared at the glovebox. At the cups. At the foil-wrapped evidence of premeditation.

"You planned this."

"I planned this."

"Since when?"

"Since last Thursday. Since you called me from a bathroom and described soap like a poet having a breakdown."

She looked at him. He looked back. The thing happened, the silence that had its own weight, its own weather, the silence that was never empty because they were both in it.

She got in the car.

• • •

Gerald's Camry had a cassette player.

This was the first thing Mollie said after buckling her seatbelt, and she said it with the reverence of an archaeologist discovering a fossil.

"It works," Fayiz said. "There's a tape in it. It's been in there since, I think, 1996. Gerald is not a man who updates his media."

Mollie pressed play. The car filled with Fleetwood Mac. Everywhere. The opening notes, bright and warm, and Theodore's ears went forward, and Mollie made a sound that was not quite a laugh and not quite a sigh and was closer to the noise a person makes when the universe does something unexpectedly kind.

"Gerald has taste," she said.

"Gerald has one tape."

"That's all you need."

They drove. The city fell away. St. John's gave way to the Southside Road and the Southside Road gave way to the Blackhead Road and the houses thinned and the trees thickened and the sky opened up the way it did when you left the harbour, the way the world got larger the closer you got to the edge of it.

She ate her toast in the passenger seat. He ate his pancakes at a red light, cutting them with a plastic fork, triangles, because some things didn't change just because the table did. Theodore received tribute from both of them.

She was different today. He'd noticed it at the car-a lightness, or something adjacent to lightness, something that moved under her surface like colour under a glaze. She'd been different since the phone call. Since the bathroom. Since he'd told her to look at the tiles and she'd come back. Not healed. Not fixed. Different. The way a painting was different after a layer dried: the same image, the same composition, but the depth had changed.

"I went to the folk thing," she said.

Casual. The way you said something you'd been timing.

"The folk thing."

"At the Arts Centre. On Harbour Drive. The series that Noor, the woman from the diner. She runs a music programme. She invited me. I went."

The name hit him sideways. Noor. The woman with the leather jacket and the Laura Marling opinion and the card she'd placed on the table like a key. The woman who'd looked at Mollie and Mollie had looked back and Fayiz had set down his fork and put his knife parallel to it and stared at his coffee because something was happening that he didn't have a definition for.

"Oh," he said. "How was it."

He said it the way Gerald had said I hope I haven't been a bad landlord, neutrally, conversationally, with the calm exterior of a man whose interior was doing something entirely different.

"It was good. Small. Intimate. She's... Noor's... she knows a lot about music. She played me some stuff I hadn't heard. We talked for a while after."

"After."

"After the show. At the bar. We had a drink. She's interesting. She grew up in Montreal. Her family's Lebanese. She's funny."

Each sentence was a nail. Fayiz received each one and felt it drive in, small and precise, into something he hadn't known was there until it started hurting.

"You went to a folk show," he said. "With Noor. And had a drink. After."

"Are you repeating what I said?"

"I'm processing what you said."

"It's not... it was just music, Fayiz. It was a folk series at an arts centre. There were seventeen people in the audience and a man with a bouzouki."

"A bouzouki."

"You're doing the thing."

"What thing."

"The thing where you repeat words because you're buying time while you decide how to feel about something."

He looked at the road. The road was straight. The road was not the problem. The problem was the woman in the passenger seat who had gone to a folk show with a woman named Noor and had drinks afterward and was now telling him about it in a car on the way to the edge of a continent and he could not, he could not, be feeling what he was feeling because what he was feeling was jealousy and he had no right to jealousy, no standing to feel it, no words to explain it. She was gay. She was his breakfast person. She was a woman who had signed a contract to die with him in twenty-three days and she was allowed to go to folk shows and have drinks and talk about music with a woman who was funny and Lebanese and from Montreal and probably didn't have paint on her knuckles or a dog that ate receipts or an ex-girlfriend in Toronto or a father who had declared her dead.

Noor made sense. Noor was the person Mollie should be sitting across from. Noor was the correct answer to a question nobody had asked, and Fayiz was... what? What was he? The wrong shape. The wrong gender. The wrong everything, except on Tuesdays and Thursdays, except in a booth, except in a silence that had its own weather, except because it's Thursday, which was not enough, which was never going to be enough, which was the most he could offer and the least she deserved.

"I'm glad you went," he said.

The sentence came out flat. Dead. The sentence came out the way paint came out of a tube that had been squeezed too hard-forced, shapeless, wrong.

Mollie looked at him.

"You're not glad I went."

"I'm glad you went."

"Your hands are white on the steering wheel."

He loosened his grip. She was right. His knuckles were bone-white, the paint in the creases standing out like a map of every canvas he'd touched.

"It's a winding road," he said.

"It's been straight for the last two kilometres."

Fleetwood Mac sang about going their own way. Neither of them said anything about it.

They drove in silence for a full minute. Then two. Theodore lay down in the back seat. The engine hummed. The tape played.

"You don't get to be weird about this," Mollie said.

Quiet. Dangerous quiet. The quiet she used before she detonated something.

"I'm not being weird."

"You are. You're being exactly as weird as you were at the diner when she walked over. You went still. Your fork stopped. You did the parallel knife thing. And now you're doing the steering wheel thing and I need you to hear what I'm saying: you don't get to be weird about this."

"Why not."

The words were out before he could catch them. Two words. Small. Enormous. The question underneath every other question, the one that had been living in the space between because it's Thursday and I'm gay, Fayiz since February, since January, since the day she came back from the disappearance and her tea was waiting.

Why not.

Mollie stared at him. He could feel it without looking, the weight of her attention, the full-body listening he'd felt across the booth a hundred times.

"Because you're not my boyfriend," she said. Carefully. Each word placed like a tile. "You're not my partner. You're not my-anything. We have breakfast. We have a contract. We have twenty-three days. That's what we have."

"That's what you said about the forty days," he said. "At the diner. When I told you about the email. You said I have forty days. That's what I have. You keep counting the days like they're a wall. Like the number is the thing that keeps us..."

"Keeps us what."

"Safe."

The word landed. She went quiet. He could see it in his peripheral vision: her hands in her lap, the ring turning, the jaw doing the thing it did when she was deciding whether to fight or retreat.

"Pull over," she said.

"We're not there yet."

"Pull the fuck over, Fayiz."

He pulled over.

☕︎