Let me tell you the thing I've never told her: the map was never broken. I was.
We've been parked outside Mickey's for forty minutes, the flight a window closing somewhere over the river. Rain unzips down the windshield in seams. The dash phone cycles its error chime — a sound like a man clearing his throat before bad news — and Elena keeps glancing at it, kind, the way you'd watch someone limp. She thinks the GPS jammed. She thinks I took the long way because the machine couldn't find it.
The machine found it. I padded the route. I've padded fares twenty-two years, but tonight I padded it for me, because once I drop her at the gate she's a Chicago number, a Sunday call, the convenient hum gone silent the day they swap me out for the system that doesn't need coffee.
Here's what she catches that I can't: I rehearsed losing you, David. Her hand is on mine on the gearshift, her knuckle clicking the way it does in cold weather. The night crew, she says. They were on about that new thing at the counter — Mickey's at nine — Dale and the new girl laughing, comparing. They'd made each other up. Named bodies, narrated what the made-up versions did, frictionless, every detail on command. They said it was better. Easier.
She turns. Silver streak, coat buttoned for a colder city. "They can build me one," she says. "To talk to. After."
"I know."
"That's what scares you."
It should scare me less than this does. That's the part I can't say out loud.
The neon stains the glass red, then dark, then red. Her forehead finds the cold window. I don't take my hand back. Outside, someone's propping Mickey's door with a milk crate, and the smell of fryer oil reaches us even through the rain. The terrible thing is how easy the fake one would be — how it would remember her coffee order and ask the right questions and never once pad the route just to sit in the dark with her a little longer. And that this — the clicking knuckle, the cold coffee in the cupholder, the plane we both know she's already missed — is the part that won't restore.
