“Mondays are brilliant,” Nona said.

“I know.” Avery took her hand and put it in his pocket. “You’re off, I’m off…and everyone else is stuck in the office. Writing their little e-mails, reading their little e-mails.”

“Everyone else?”

“Suckers. Sad sacks. Soul sellers.”

Nona rolled a piece of candy from one side of her mouth to the other. It drove him crazy when she did that. She tucked it in her cheek and asked, “What do you know about working in an office, anyway?”

“I know it fucking blows, that’s what. What do you know about it?”

“I’ve done time in all sorts of places. Plus, and this might be news to you—I’m no spring chicken.”

“Really? I hadn’t noticed.” Nona stuck out her tongue. The inside of her mouth was stained dark purple. “So then, where’ve you worked, Office Girl?”

In response she only stretched, arcing her joined hands high enough behind her head to elicit a series of little pops and cracks from her back. He watched her gaze at a garbage truck rumbling past, and how the truck doubled and mirrored itself in her sunglasses. They were huddled in a doorway, trying to stay out of the wind. “Where is that guy?” Nona said, stomping her feet.

Avery immediately shrugged off his jacket.

“No, no.”

“Shut up.” He bundled her up like a little kid. It sent a thrill through him, the way she was instantly dwarfed inside his coat. Nona pulled her hair free from the collar. Long, ratty dreads and braids splayed across the fleece shoulders, and Avery had to restrain himself from tugging at one. Or biting it.

They were on Myrtle Avenue, standing across the street from the bare, padlocked Blue Apple Diner, in the Fort Greene section of Brooklyn. Although gentrification had worked its way through this historic African-American neighborhood years ago—its brownstones revived and resold, cafés and bars full of monied hipsters (a lot like Avery, he had to admit) pushing out the older, original residents—none of that had made it to this stretch of Myrtle, a few blocks north of Fort Greene Park and the looming brick towers of the Wentworth Housing Project. Avery knew that in their demos, the rapper kids from Wentworth called it “Murder Ave.” What had been the Blue Apple Diner was the ninth space he had looked at, and the first one he wanted Nona to see too. They had already tried to peer through the soaped windows, and Avery had gone on and on about how little it would take to pull down the old overhanging sign and tear off that nasty, ancient fake-wood trim running along the front. Stripped down, minimal, clean—that would be his look. (At the last minute, he’d avoided saying the word vision.) Nona had listened quietly, eyes roaming the street, the scene.

“Anyway, the foot-traffic thing?” he said now, bouncing up and down a little to distract himself from the cold. “Whatever. It’s a destination, a place people go to for a reason. Not some place they’re just strolling by and stop in to eat a three-hour dinner.”

“Some people are already strolling by,” Nona said. Across the street, an older black woman slowly wheeled a shopping cart full of garbage bags. They both watched as she paused to hawk a glob of spit into the entranceway of the Blue Apple Diner and then continue on her way. Avery sighed.

“This is the guy,” he said, a minute later. A squat, dusty brown car had double-parked outside the restaurant, and Ricardo got out. He was in his mid-forties, with a black leather jacket and complicated, precisely shaved facial hair. They crossed the street to where he was unlocking the metal grate in front of the diner, cell phone wedged between ear and shoulder. He shook Avery’s hand and held the door open for Nona, motioning them inside.

“If it says, ‘in person,’ then it means in person,” Ricardo was saying into the phone. “Otherwise, what the fuck?” He crossed the room ahead of them and switched on the lights. Avery half wished he wouldn’t.

“How much?” Nona asked. Fluorescent panels above them buzzed and flickered, greenish white. A long orange counter ran the length of the room, though where the stools had been was now a row of broken holes in the dingy tile. But the tables were still here, six or so four-tops with flimsy metal legs. Beat-up chairs were scattered around, some knocked over backward, a few set upside down on the tabletops.

“Sixty-five hundred,” Avery admitted, kicking aside a crumpled paper bag. “Plus two months’ deposit.”

“A bargain, then,” Nona said.

“Okay, but you’re seeing the worst of it. So, all this comes out. I pull up the tile and redo the floors. That’s first. Then, the bar. Knock this out”—Avery tugged on the orange countertop and it came away from its base easily—“which won’t be too hard, obviously.” He pounded it back into place with a glance toward Ricardo, just outside. “What else? Oh, the bathroom. Yeah, don’t go in there.”

“Roger that.”

“But check this out—here’s where it all comes together.” He tugged Nona around the back of the bar and into the kitchen. She turned in a slow circle, taking in the stained range, uneven shelving, and the walk-in refrigerator, but Avery could tell she wasn’t getting it. Walk-in fridge!

“No diner has a kitchen like this, first of all. They have a big goddamn griddle and a couple toasters! Two ovens? You can roast four chickens at once in these! You don’t need these for anyone’s basic fucking fry-up. This guy told me there was another place here, before the diner. Some kind of soul-food joint, in the eighties. It’s all been sitting here since then. Probably untouched.”

Nona had wandered over to the six-burner stove and reached out to touch something Avery hadn’t noticed—a tiny, dark wood frame nailed directly into the wall, eye level. It displayed a worn dollar bill with 1999 scribbled across the front in black marker.

“Another thing: all this stuff is already here.”

Nona didn’t say anything. Avery felt frustrated, talking to her back.

“Did you hear me?”

“I heard you. Is that unusual?”

“Yeah, it’s unusual. Any other place, we’d be looking at empty holes in the wall, hookups for gas and electricity. This all comes with. I mean, it’s not TV-chef shit or anything, but it’s another ten or twelve grand I don’t have to lay out.”

“So, what happened?”

“Well, Ricardo just said yeah, it’s included. And if he doesn’t know what it’s worth, I’m not going to be the one to tell him.”

“No. What happened to this guy”—Nona flicked at the plastic covering the dollar bill—“Mr. Blue Apple.”

Avery shrugged. “He got behind on the rent.” He waited for her to respond. “I mean, yeah, it’s a risk. But the way I see it, the neighborhood’s not going to support a local place on a regular basis. It’s not really the brunch crowd out here. Coffee and eggs, even at a steady pace—say, forty covers—that’s not going to be enough.”

Nona turned to him and nodded, but in an annoyingly vague kind of way, Avery thought. “Are you getting hungry?” she said.

“The difference is, with a twenty-dollar entrée, there’s less pressure to get people in the door all day long. And like I said, it’s a destination thing.” Avery knew he sounded neither clear nor convincing, even to himself, but it was distressing to see her just wander out to the front again. He was suddenly exhausted, and just stood there for a while, in the musty back area near the john—whatever that god-awful swampy smell was, he just didn’t want to know—watching Nona, back out on the street. She was still wearing his jacket. She was saying something to Ricardo, who now got all attentive and serious, in a way he never had been with Avery.

Men did this around Nona. Never once in his life had Avery cared about other guys checking out his girlfriends—back in Chicago, to be fair, he’d often been so high he probably wouldn’t even have noticed—but now he found himself seething at the way men bent to listen to Nona, putting their nasty heads down too close to her face. She drew initial looks, double-takes, because of her style—the mass of dreads, the off-kilter outfits, like today’s: baggy brown wool pants and splatter-painted sneakers—and Avery might have been okay with that had it not usually led to the kind of riveted, impressed attention that Ricardo was displaying now, whenever Nona began to speak. (Why did she have to speak so much? To anyone other than Avery, that is?)

He shut the lights off, and instantly the details of the broken, squalid room disappeared. “What’s up?” Avery said, pushing out the door to join them.

“You got my number, kid,” Ricardo said. “But I wouldn’t sit on it too long, all right? Couple other guys are interested. And another thing,” he said, moving past Nona to yank down the grate. “You call me again, it’s to sign the lease. I’m not hauling out here to ‘Gangland’ again for shits and giggles. Not that the company isn’t a pleasure”—this with a grin at Nona. Then he padlocked the chain, slammed into his car, and drove off. They watched him do a sharp U-turn on Myrtle and roar past them, heading south for the exits to the bridges.

“I can’t get on the train unless we eat,” Nona said, smiling. “I’ll pass out. And I told Henri I’d be at the studio by four, so…” She zigzagged her body to and fro, east and west. “Which way?”

“So, what were you two talking about?”

“What?”

“With that guy. Ricardo. You guys were pretty chatty out here.” Avery heard himself, and hated himself, but couldn’t stop. Hearing for the first time that she had plans for later in the day—plans that didn’t include him—tipped the scales, and now he slid into helpless, half-pleasurable self-pity.

“‘Chatty’? Well, yes, we were chatting. Quite a bit, in fact, while you finished your tour. Give me a minute.” Nona shut her eyes and put a couple fingers to her forehead. “I’ll see if I can reconstruct the exact conversation for you. Line by line.”

“Whatever.”

“Really? Is this a jealousy thing? Right. Sorry—I’m supposed to be flattered now.”

“I just don’t get why you’d rather stand around and talk to that douche bag about whatever—”

“Avery. Cut the shit. I hardly think a two-minute discussion about Staten Island merits the third degree.” Nona cocked her head and smiled, offering a chance for Avery to get reasonable and call it quits.

“Why the fuck were you talking about Staten Island?” he said flatly. “What, does he have some other overpriced shit-hole out there I should go visit?”

“We were talking about Staten Island because he fucking lives in Staten Island. And because I was making polite small talk with your friendly slumlord so that you could have a fucking minute in there alone to figure it out. Jesus.” Nona stalked up the street, and Avery followed. He was fairly sure she didn’t know where she was going. For a little while, they did nothing but walk fast and furious up Myrtle Avenue, Avery a few feet behind Nona.

“Come on,” he called up to her. She didn’t stop. “Could you just fucking hold on, for a minute?”

In response, Nona threw a hand backward in a kind of get-lost wave.

“Why are you being such a bitch?”

That did it.

Nona wheeled around, unzipped Avery’s jacket, and let it drop to the ground. She laughed a little, not in a good way. “What do you want from me? I’m not your mommy, Avery. I’m not your little trust-fund manager. What, I’m supposed to jump up and down because you suddenly get a whim about wild salmon in the ghetto? Grow up.”

“I don’t have a trust fund!” Avery exclaimed. And instantly thought, Do I?

“What would you be risking? What are the stakes? When some of us ‘get behind on the rent,’ we don’t tap some suburban nest egg and merrily go along our way.”

“Is that what this is about? That my family has money?”

“See, when you say that, with your face all I can’t believe it—it’s like, oh, what a petty little thing for her to bring up. That’s exactly the point.”

“I didn’t make a face like that.”

“My mother worked in an office. She was a secretary at a law firm in Pittsburgh for twenty-five years. When her first boss retired, she got a new boss, younger than I was—and the same desk, same paycheck, same hour-and-a-half commute. Okay?”

“Okay,” Avery said. Music came thumping faintly inside a basement-level church nearby. An older man, leaning on a crumbled brick railing, watched them with obvious interest. “Well, you never told me that before.”

Nona shook her head. She was standing on his jacket, looking unhappy and cold. “See? You don’t even—Forget it.”

“But you just stood there and looked at all of it and didn’t say anything!” Avery said in a rush. “I don’t get it! Are you pissed at me, or something?”

“What did you think I’d say?”

“I thought you’d show some fucking interest, for one thing.”

The man on the stoop sucked his teeth loudly. “Better watch it, boy.”

Nona whirled to face him. “Is there any place to eat around here?”

The man took his time, thinking it over.

“Come on,” Avery said. “Can we just—”

“McDonald’s over on Willoughby.”

“That’s—that way, right?”

Avery tried to put his hand on her arm. “Nona, please. You don’t want McDonald’s.”

“You don’t get to say what I eat!” She took off around the corner.

“Thanks a lot, man,” Avery called to the oldster on the stairs, bending down to grab his jacket. A smashed, half-eaten donut was stuck to one arm.

“I ain’t said nothing ’bout nothing.” The man chuckled as Avery ran past him.

He pounded down the street, and what flashed through his head, randomly, was Winnie and that crazy-ass pool she wanted to plant right smack in their front yard. The stubborn, don’t-give-a-shit look he’d seen on her face each time one of the contractors tried to argue with her. Wrong place, bad idea, too close to the house? She didn’t care. Axe some mammoth tree standing in her way? Fine. Just get it done. That was what he should be like, with the restaurant. It was pretty embarrassing to find himself wishing for the mental attributes of some eighty-year-old lady, but there you have it, Avery thought.

A block or so later, he caught up with Nona.

“Listen. Just listen for a second, all right?” She wasn’t looking at him, but then she wasn’t racing ahead anymore, either. Avery couldn’t remember the last time he’d had a fight with a girlfriend—hell, with anyone—when he wasn’t fucked up already, or at least had the promise, the consolation, of getting that way afterward. He took a deep breath. “First of all, I apologize for the thing about office people, if that’s where this started. I did not, in any way, mean someone like your mom. Who I would love to meet, by the way. When you want me to, I mean—never mind. But, okay, I can see where that was a really shitty thing to say, and why you’d be pissed off and that it would make you all, you know, distant and stuff at the restaurant—” Nona tried to interrupt, but Avery hurried on. “Doesn’t matter, doesn’t matter. The point is that I should have thought before I spoke. So that’s one part.”

Nona was watching his face carefully.

“But I have to ask something. Well, two things. Here’s the first one, and I just have to know.” They were standing in front of a chain-link fence, freezing. “When we went to Maryland. Are you saying that was weird? I mean, me paying for all of it?”

It was going to kill him if she was now going to turn those two days and two nights, every one a strong candidate for Avery’s best ever, into some kind of depressing I-feel-cheap-when-you-pay-for-me thing. The day after Avery had cashed the check Jerry had given him to buy a computer and printer, he’d spent an hour online at the coffee shop, rented a car, made some reservations, and told Nona to call in sick at Silkworm. Really sick. They’d driven a straight shot to Baltimore, and spent the next forty-eight hours in a salty, blurry haze: softshell crabs in red plastic baskets, one night at a skanky motel and the next at a fussy bed-and-breakfast where they pounded the rattly bed so hard that the proprietor avoided all eye contact the next day, plus one unforgettable blow-out meal at Le Finestrine, a tucked-away place where Avery ordered enough food to earn a hushed respect from the stiff-necked waiters and cause the chef to come join them at the table with a bottle of 1964 Latour. Avery didn’t need anything else in the world, in that moment where Nona raised the glass to her lips and he got to watch her face as she tasted the wine. Everything distilled itself—the food, the miles of highway, her body and what it did to him—into one perfect shimmering fusion, right then.

“‘Weird? You want to know if I felt weird?” Nona said. Was she making fun of his choice of words? Was she ready to stop being mad? “‘Weird’ is my middle name.”

Something wordless passed between them and whatever it was gave Avery the green light to pull her close. Nona shivered in his arms.

“What’s the second question?” she asked, face muffled against his chest.

“You don’t really want McDonald’s, do you?”

“Hell, no,” she said, pulling away. “Now, buy me a real lunch, moneybags.”

Well, so what if he wanted her approval? So what if trying to do something—the first thing ever, on his own—came as a direct result of wanting to have her see him in a new light, of wanting her to be proud of him? That was only the initial impulse, the image in his head of a new look of respect on Nona’s face, the way she could say to people, My boyfriend? Yeah, he’s a chef. He owns his own place—you should really come by some night. Plus, he’s awesome in bed. It wasn’t just that, though, the stupid fantasies that would run uncontrolled through his head while he chopped cucumber and fried falafel at Pita Pie. (The worst, the most embarrassing, involved flashbulbs going off at opening night, celebrities turned away at the door, and Nona in this tight red dress, perched at the bar and smiling at him as he sent out plate after plate of fabulousness to the ecstatic foodie crowds packing the tables. Really. Red dress. Flashbulbs!) First of all, Avery would argue to himself, what the fuck was wrong with wanting to make your lover proud of you? Was that, or was that not, something totally understandable and decent? But, just in case it was hugely uncool, he hastened to remind himself that there were several other recent factors that contributed to the idea of opening his own place. The plan.

First, aside from wanting to win Nona’s favorable opinion on everything about himself, Avery had to admit that hanging around her friends was good for something other than secret inward competitions he would set up all night long and then, naturally, always win: MacArthur grant? Good for you, bro. But guess what? She’s going home with me! Nona knew everyone and had plans almost every night: workshops, rehearsals, performances, readings. As for her own kind of music—the art-song stuff—Nona didn’t talk about it that much, with Avery at least, although he knew she was working hard on some new series. But she took him to a midnight Beckett production under the Manhattan Bridge; she was a regular in this group of people learning how to play folk songs in Estonian or Peruvian or something; two nights ago he met her at a show where men were miming frenzied sex while someone intoned old radio advertisement jingles into a microphone. A lot of it was laughable, some of it was startling, but all of it reminded Avery that he wasn’t doing anything. Back home, he’d had drugs, and the galvanizing fear of getting caught. Out here, though, he didn’t have a goal or a dream or an agenda or a drive or a burning desire—other than Nona, of course. Not that he wanted to be in a body stocking up on stage, humping some guy, but after a while it started to get to you, all this art. Plus, he was tired of saying he was a cook at Pita Pie to Nona’s friends, after whatever performance, when they would politely ask him what he did. Actually, Avery was even tired of saying the words “Pita Pie.”

But it hadn’t been at some cutting-edge downtown performance that Avery’s plan had taken shape. No, that had occurred out in Hartfield, of all places. Avery was dutifully taking the train there every week, or almost, for the hour or so it would take his grandfather to talk himself tired while Avery squirmed and fidgeted and tried to look interested. There was always so little air in that study. Avery found himself yawning compulsively, and desperate to fight off sleep. After he’d blown the $2500 on the weekend in Maryland with Nona, he had shown up for their first session with an eighty-dollar used laptop from a junk electronics store on Forty-second Street. Jerry either hadn’t noticed the difference or wasn’t saying—and there’d been no further mention of a digital recorder. Mostly, Grandad was content to talk, on and on, while Avery pretended to be getting it all down, hunting and pecking with two middle fingers. What did he talk about? Well, it was hard to say, since the busted laptop had one video game that still worked: cascading colored bricks that had to be arranged just so before they landed. Avery was up to the fourth level.

One day he was drafting what he liked to imagine was a scorching love letter, safe behind the open cover of the computer and the tapping of the keys. Grandad was going on and on; it didn’t matter much if Avery listened or not. Not that he didn’t sometimes listen! They were up to the year when Jerry and Frank, not content with their little paper packing company in 1950-whatever, mortgaged their houses and took out a loan worth four times the size of their entire business in order to buy a competitor’s firm. They had six months to turn a profit, or they would default. It wasn’t completely uninteresting. It just wasn’t where Avery was at in his life, this on and on and on about the past. He had things to do now.

“So you won’t need to make that mistake,” Grandad said, laughing at some memory. “No, I’d say we covered that one for you. But good.”

Avery looked up. His fingers hovered over the keyboard. For me? What was he talking about?

“I’m not blathering on for my own amusement,” Grandad said, serious now. “Not just for my own amusement. Don’t tell me you want to cook peanut sandwiches for someone else for the rest of your life.”

“Pita,” Avery corrected, but he was distracted. His grandfather took an envelope out from a desk drawer and slid it toward him. Occasionally this is how he would give Avery a little cash, for the train fare. But when Avery looked at the figure on the check inside the envelope, what he saw there wasn’t a train-fare kind of amount.

“Now, I haven’t signed it yet,” Grandad said, taking the envelope back. “But you saw your name there, didn’t you? It’s waiting here for you, as soon as you’re ready.”

“Ready for what?”

Grandad waited a moment before answering, enjoying Avery’s confusion. “For your first investor to pony up,” he said.

Avery was silent, still stunned. His own…restaurant? Could he really? What kind of place…what kind of food? A thousand new thoughts began to form. Grandad watched him, then put the envelope away and shut the drawer firmly. And then he began to talk again, about business in the old days.

Later on, Avery had come downstairs, his head swimming. Had that just happened, with the money, with the idea of his own place? As usual, Winnie was reading on the couch in the living room. She put aside her library book right away—The Plot Against America by Philip Roth. Same book in his backpack.

“Another soda?”

“No, I’m good. I should be heading back. What’s the latest out there?”

Winnie sighed and glanced out at the lawn, where several stakes and red plastic tape hung, wet and abandoned, in the downpour. “A big old mess,” she said cheerfully. “Rachel’s tree man went out of town for three weeks—and you should see all the customer complaints I found on the Web, about that one pool company that I’d been interested in. So it’s back to the drawing board. That tree’s spared—for the moment, anyway.”

From where he stood, Avery had a full view of the doomed sycamore; it was almost as if it had been planted exactly there in order to be seen from the living room’s main window. It was a pretty beautiful tree, not that he was a nature freak, or anything. He glanced away guiltily, but Winnie caught him—and she had that mischievious smile, the one that said I’ll do what I want.

Avery hated to put this into words, even in the privacy of his own head, but at times like this he could see what his grandfather saw in Winnie. And then, inevitably—like now—he would find himself appraising her lithe, trim figure as she moved across the room. Or wondering how much action his grandfather was getting. What did old people actually do, when it came time to get it on? Did the same standards and rules apply? Or was there a whole new order of business?

“Avery? What do you think?”

He snapped out of it. “I…what were you saying?”

“About these visits. We love them, of course. But…are they causing problems between you and your mother?”

His mother? “Why would they? I mean, she’s the one who made me swear to come out here. I mean, not that I don’t want to, or anything.”

Winnie brightened. “Good, good. I’ll run you right over to the station—but would you mind doing a little heavy lifting first? Rachel dropped off more boxes. You’d think, working in the kind of store she does, that she wouldn’t need to save all these old things of the girls’, but—”

Avery hoisted up a box and headed down to the basement. He didn’t really need to hear all the details, and as usual by the end of a Hartfield visit, he was dying to get out of there. But there was something long-ago familiar about the brown-and-cream color of the children’s book he glimpsed inside, and when he pulled apart the box flaps and saw the cover of Maurice Sendak’s In the Night Kitchen, Avery was hit with such a powerful sense memory that he had to sit down on the cold basement floor. Exactly like my old copy, he thought, turning the worn pages of the illustrated paperback with a pleasure so intense and unexpected it was actually painful. Maybe it was his old copy? An unreasonable thought, but unshakable, since every single picture—a naked little boy tumbling out of his bed into the starlit world of the night kitchen, those fleshy titan bakers alternately terrifying and pathetic, the city made of flour-can buildings and milk-bottle skyscrapers, all set against an inky blue-black sky—every one, Avery knew by heart. All of a sudden he was eight, lying flat on his back in his bed, in the old house in Evanston. If he held the book high enough overhead, arms straight, and angled it just right, he could catch enough light from the window to see the pictures. Occasionally, the strained sound of his mother’s laughter would float up from downstairs. He was supposed to be asleep. His father had left them—gone for good, is how he’d overheard his mother put it—the summer before.

“Milk in the batter! Milk in the batter! We bake cake! And nothing’s the matter!”

In the shadows of his grandfather’s basement, Avery allowed himself another moment, sitting there alone. He already knew he’d steal the book and that this theft would be stupid and unnecessary. Of course Winnie would let him have it, if he asked. But he wasn’t going to ask. He was going to slip In the Night Kitchen into his pack and carry it onto the train, where he could savor Mickey’s triumph—soaring up and up, in his bread-dough plane, to pour the milk and save the day—in private. These extra moments, then, here in his grandfather’s basement, weren’t so that he could finish reading the book. They were to quell sudden hot tears that had caught him off guard.

“I don’t get it,” Nona was saying to the guy behind the counter at Kennedy Chicken. She had been studying the plastic overhead menu with the utter concentration of someone determined to crack a code. ‘ “Quarter chicken, comes with bread or salsa’? That doesn’t make sense. I mean, because the two things aren’t equal. Salsa is more like a sauce, like something that should already be a part of the order, whereas bread—that’s kind of like a side.”

“You want both? That’s extra.”

“Maybe I want both, but first I want to understand the options. Can you show me the salsa? Does it come with anything?”

“Does the salsa come with anything? Girl, it comes with the chicken.” Now it was the cook who was baffled. Avery just leaned against the counter, happy to be here. He’d steered them back to Myrtle and down to Flatbush, homing in on this place that now seemed like paradise, compared to the ugliness of the Blue Apple and their fight out on the street. At least forty whole chickens were cooking away behind the register, spit-roasting in various shades of dark, oily gold.

Avery savored this moment, with Nona taking forever to order—now she was hassling the cook about the different sizes of the salsa containers—before they would sit, alone at the tiny plastic table. Before their food would arrive, and they’d have a few minutes where he’d have to decide whether or not to go there again, back to the fight that hadn’t ended so much as come to a stop (there was a difference, he knew, and yeah, he knew that it was significant). Should he push her to say more? He could feel there was stuff Nona hadn’t said, about the money, things she was holding back. Which would feel worse: hearing now what they might be, or guessing at them later? This wary peace lulled him, as did the smoky char smell that filled the room. Probably it was all fine. Avery watched the chickens roast. They looked great: fresh and plump. In a minute, he’d ask this guy for the name of his local supplier.

Later today, he’d call Ricardo and go sign the damn lease.