“Sounds perfect,” I said. “But I’ll need a better jacket.”
* * * *
We stopped off at my apartment before we went to the park that night. I swallowed down a million apologies for the way it looked. Sorry, I work nights and so I don’t have a lot of time to clean. Sorry, it’s all I could afford after I left my PhD program with too much debt and not enough credentials to make it worthwhile. Sorry, I don’t have a cleaning service or even a good super to fix the leaky pipes that I’m pretty sure are growing black mold under my counter. All of it was unnecessary, though. We were only there so I could grab a better coat, and maybe check my machine to see if something had changed in the state of the world, but that was it.
When I noticed the blinking red light, I asked if it was okay for me to ch
