Chapter 1 #2
The man looked at the dog. Looked at Malcolm. And there it was, finally — a real one, a fast unguarded huff of a laugh that cracked the whole careful face wide open for exactly one second before he shut it back down.
There he is, Malcolm thought, and then had the odd, off-balance sensation of a man who'd stepped down expecting a stair that wasn't there.
***
It took forty minutes.
Malcolm had offered, twice, to help, and been told twice that he would only be in the way, so he did the thing he was good at instead, which was to lean against the counter, out of the splash zone, and watch a person be excellent at something.
Because the man — he still hadn't given a name, which Malcolm noted and filed and decided he'd get eventually — was excellent.
He worked the foul mixture through Nigel's coat in sections, talking the whole time, a low steady stream aimed entirely at the dog.
Okay. I know. I know, it's cold, you're being so brave, you absolute goblin.
And Nigel, who did not do well with strangers, who had bitten a vet tech in Atlanta and drawn actual blood from Malcolm's sister, stood there and let this stranger scrub peroxide into his face and grumbled and stayed.
"So what's the suit for," Frankie said, not looking up, working a section behind Nigel's ear. It came out flat, obligatory, a man making noise to fill a room he was stuck in. "Wedding? Funeral? You've got funeral posture."
"Party." Malcolm settled deeper against the counter. "Industry thing. I've got a film at the festival."
That got a pause — small, fast, covered. "A film. At the festival." Frankie's tone said he'd heard I've got a film at the festival from roughly every third person to walk into an east-end coffee shop that week. "Sure. Let me guess. Three hours, a man stares at a wall, it's about grief."
"Eleven minutes, and it's about a woman who runs a laundromat in Macon," Malcolm said. "So. Close."
The twitch again, at the corner of the mouth. He was fighting it and losing by degrees, the same way the smell was going. "Eleven minutes. You flew all the way up here for eleven minutes."
"I did." And here was the thing he didn't usually say, that came out anyway — maybe because the man wasn't looking at him, maybe because it was easier to say to a bent copper head than to a face.
"It's the first thing I ever made because I wanted to instead of because it was smart.
Twenty years of making the smart thing. This one's just mine.
" He heard how that landed and let it sit, since there was no taking it back.
"So. Eleven minutes. Yeah. I flew up for it. "
For a moment there was only the radio, and the wet sound of the work, and Nigel's put-upon sighing.
"Huh," Frankie said. Quieter than everything before it. And he didn't follow it with a joke — which, Malcolm was beginning to understand, was the most revealing thing the man had done all night.
Then, like he'd caught himself doing it, Frankie snapped back to brisk and tipped Nigel's chin up with one gloved finger.
"Well. Don't get skunk on the laundromat lady.
" To the dog: "Your dad's got range, huh.
Smart films, sad films, and the single worst survival instinct I've ever seen in an animal. "
"He contains multitudes," Malcolm said.
"He contains a skunk," Frankie said. "That's the multitude. That's what's in there."
The smell retreated by degrees. Something clean came up under it — oatmeal, then, at the end, a bright ridiculous burst of blueberry from a bottle the man spritzed once, twice, with the flourish of a chef finishing a plate.
"Blueberry," Malcolm said.
"He earned it." The man toweled Nigel down, brisk and thorough, and the dog came out of it fluffed and affronted and, Malcolm had to admit, magnificent. "There. You're gorgeous. You're a whole new man. Don't go near any more skunks, you have terrible instincts."
"He really does. He picks fights he can't win." Malcolm paused. "It's a family trait."
The man glanced up at that, quick, and this time the flat look had a question in it, brief, like he couldn't decide if Malcolm was flirting or just Southern. Malcolm couldn't entirely have answered that himself, which was new, and which he also set down for later.
The man snapped his gloves off and named a number, and it was fair, more than fair, low for the hour and the horror of it. Malcolm handed over a card and, when it processed, added a tip that made the little machine think about it.
The man looked at the screen. His jaw set. "That's too much."
"It's a Friday of the festival and I walked in at seven-forty smelling like that. It's not enough."
"I don't need—" He stopped. Reset, cooler. "It's fine. Whatever. Your dog's clean, you can go be late now."
And that was the exit. Right there. The dog was clean, the man had turned to wipe down the table with the brisk finality of someone closing a door, and Malcolm had a party and a buyer and a furious agent and every reason on earth to pick up his gorgeous new dog and walk out into the night.
He stayed where he was.
"His coat," Malcolm heard himself say. "You said something, when you started. About it needing real work."
The man turned back, wary. "I said the recipe strips the coat. He'll be dry for a few days. That's all."
"So he needs — a follow-up. A proper thing. Not an emergency." Malcolm gestured, vaguely, at the whole excellent operation of the place, and did not examine too closely why his mouth was still going. "I'm in town till the end of the festival. I could bring him back. Do it right."
For a second the man just studied him, and Malcolm had the uncomfortable and not-unpleasant sense of being read by someone as good at it as he was.
Whatever the man saw, it made the wary look sharpen into something else — not warmer, exactly.
More careful. Like he'd caught the shape of a bad idea and recognized it.
"We book online," the man said finally. "There's a QR code by the door. Nigel's a repeat client now, so." He turned back to the table. "The system'll remember him."
It was a dismissal. It was also, technically, a yes.
Malcolm scooped up the dog, who was warm and clean and smelled absurdly of a muffin, and got to the door, and the bell chimed its cheerful oblivious chime, and he stopped with his hand on the glass.
"You never told me your name," he said. "For the — for the booking. So the system knows who to thank."
A beat. The man didn't turn around, and his voice, when it came, was dry as the coat he'd just stripped.
"Frankie," he said. "It's Frankie."
"Malcolm," Malcolm said again, uselessly, since he'd already said it, and Frankie knew, and neither of them acknowledged that he'd just done it anyway.
Then he was out on Queen East with a muffin-scented dog and a dead suit over his arm, and the streetcar rattled past throwing sparks, and his phone was buzzing itself off the edge of sanity in his pocket — Renata, it would be Renata, it would be a party and a buyer and the entire reason he'd flown to this city.
Malcolm stood on the sidewalk a moment longer than he needed to, looking back at the lit window of a grooming shop, and the man inside it who'd rationed exactly one laugh all night like it might be the last one he had.
Huh, he thought.
Then he flagged a cab, because he was already forty minutes late, and getting later.