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Late-afternoon traffic moved steadily along Lake Street in Oak Park, thickening every time the lights changed and thinning again in long metallic streams toward Harlem. August heat had settled into the pavement and brickwork, holding the day close even as the sun began its slow descent behind the buildings. Tires made a soft continuous rush over the road. A bus sighed at the curb farther down the block, discharged three women carrying shopping bags and an elderly man in a straw hat, then pulled away with a shudder that sent a momentary haze of exhaust through the bright air.
The diner occupied the ground floor of a narrow two-storey brick building not far from Marion Street, squeezed between a pharmacy and a small shop whose window was crowded with handbags, scarves and shoes arranged on cream-coloured stands. Its front was mostly glass, interrupted by a chrome-edged door and a painted panel promising breakfast all day beneath a fading red-and-white awning. Behind the windows, booths ran along the wall in alternating strips of burgundy vinyl and pale Formica. A waitress moved between them carrying a coffeepot, her white shoes appearing and disappearing beneath tables whenever the reflections on the glass allowed the interior to show through.
Jennifer waited just outside the door.
She had found the narrow stripe of shade cast by the awning and remained there without leaning against the window or pacing. She occupied remarkably little of the pavement, especially whenever groups passed between her and the street, swallowing her for several seconds before leaving her visible again. Her pale hair had been pinned back from her face against the heat, though a few strands had worked free around her temples. She wore a simple summer dress that fell below her knees, light enough for the weather but without anything about it calculated to catch an eye. A small handbag hung from one hand. The other rested loosely against its strap.
Two teenage girls came along the pavement sharing a paper bag of something fried, their shoulders almost touching as they bent toward one another. They passed Jennifer without interrupting themselves. One momentarily stepped closer to the diner window to avoid a man coming the opposite direction, putting barely a foot between herself and Jennifer, yet never looked at her face. Their conversation and the smell of salt followed them eastward until traffic swallowed both.
A woman pushing a pram slowed near the diner to adjust the blanket tucked around the child inside. Jennifer shifted a little farther toward the building so there was room to pass. The woman gave the automatic glance people exchanged when navigating around one another in a crowded public place, saw only another woman waiting beside a doorway, and continued along Lake Street. The pram wheels clicked over a crack in the pavement. The child inside raised one bare foot briefly into view and then disappeared beneath the canopy.
Jennifer watched them go for a few seconds.
The street had the restless ordinary rhythm of an afternoon that had no reason to remember itself. Shop doors opened and closed. A deliveryman maneuvered stacked crates through the entrance of the pharmacy, balancing the top one against his shoulder when it threatened to slip. Someone somewhere nearby had a radio playing through an open window, too distant for the words to carry clearly. Every few moments the melody was broken apart by a passing truck and reassembled once the heavier engine noise had faded.
Across the road, a man in shirtsleeves stood outside a storefront smoking while reading the sports section of a newspaper folded into quarters. He glanced up when a horn sounded, looked toward the intersection, then returned immediately to the page. Jennifer was within his line of sight. He gave no indication that she existed.
She preferred it that way.
A little farther down Lake Street, hints of the political afternoon periodically intruded upon the ordinary one. Cars appeared with campaign stickers fixed crookedly inside their rear windows. A group of younger people crossed the intersection together carrying rolled placards under their arms, their pace quick and purposeful compared with the shoppers drifting between stores. One had a button pinned prominently to his shirt. Another carried several more in a cardboard box against her hip. They disappeared around the corner, leaving behind only the faint impression of movement toward somewhere more crowded.
The speech itself was near enough that its existence occasionally reached the block without becoming distinct. There would be a swell of distant noise, something between applause and the collective murmur of a large gathering, then nothing but traffic again. Jennifer never turned automatically toward it. She had already heard the preparations, the tests of microphones, the movement of staff and volunteers, the repetition of timings and names. Here, several streets removed from the centre of it, the campaign had become only another distant sound competing with buses and horns.
She checked the street instead. Not anxiously. Merely carefully. Each time pedestrians emerged from the thicker foot traffic toward the intersection, her eyes moved over them and returned. A woman in a broad summer hat. Two men carrying briefcases. An elderly couple walking slowly enough that everyone else divided around them. A young mother with a little boy holding tightly to two fingers of her hand. Nobody matched the person Jennifer expected.
The diner door opened behind her and released a burst of cool air carrying coffee, frying onions and the sweet heaviness of pie. A man came through fastening the middle button of his jacket with one hand while folding a receipt into his wallet with the other. He nearly walked into Jennifer before noticing her, adjusted his path with a small sideways movement, and was already searching his pockets for his car keys before he had taken three more steps.
The door eased shut again.
Jennifer stayed beneath the awning. Heat had flushed the tops of her cheeks slightly. The shade protected her from direct sunlight but not from the warmth rising from the concrete. A fine breeze occasionally moved along the street, finding its way between the buildings and lifting the loose ends of her hair before dying almost immediately. When it came, Jennifer tilted her face toward it without thinking, enjoying the few seconds of relief before the air became still again.
Her dress shifted gently around her calves.
Inside the diner, a child appeared at the window. He had climbed onto his knees in a booth and pressed both palms against the glass while looking out at the street. His mother or grandmother sat opposite him, visible only as a hand reaching periodically toward a plate. The boy looked at the bus, the automobiles, the delivery crates and finally Jennifer. His gaze rested upon her with the uncomplicated curiosity children sometimes gave strangers.
As Jennifer noticed him her expression softened. The boy studied her for several seconds and then became interested in something else, twisting around in the booth so abruptly that his elbow nearly struck the sugar dispenser. Jennifer's smile lingered after he had vanished from the window.
The reflection in the glass briefly caught her alongside the passing street. At certain angles she appeared almost transparent against it, her small figure layered over cars, signs and moving pedestrians. Nothing in the image announced her. There was no entourage clustered nearby, no campaign worker beside her, no photographer positioned to preserve the waiting. Anyone who had seen her picture often enough might have recognized the pale hair, the face, perhaps the particular set of her shoulders, but recognition required looking first.
A pair of middle-aged women came out of the pharmacy, one carrying a brown paper bag folded neatly at the top. They stopped several yards from Jennifer while one searched through her purse. Coins changed hands. The women continued west. Neither looked toward the diner.
A young man in a mechanic's shirt hurried past with dark grease embedded around his fingernails. A postal worker crossed at Marion. A woman emerged from the handbag shop carrying nothing and stood for a moment beneath its awning as though reconsidering something she had left behind. An older Black man in a light summer suit walked with a newspaper tucked under one arm and gave Jennifer a polite nod as he passed. She returned it. Neither slowed.
Behind all of them, Chicago's western edge seemed to breathe through the traffic.
Lake Street stretched away between low commercial buildings, utility poles, signs and intermittent trees, its perspective broken by intersections and the shimmer of heat over automobile roofs. The buildings carried the settled accumulation of different decades without seeming to notice the contradiction. Newer signs hung over older brick. Chrome framed windows installed beneath stonework darkened by years of exhaust and winter. Air conditioners protruded from upstairs windows and dripped onto narrow ledges below.
Her habit of waiting was patient rather than empty. She noticed a sparrow repeatedly darting beneath a parked car after crumbs. She noticed that one letter in the diner's painted window sign had begun peeling away at the edge. She noticed a woman on the opposite pavement repeatedly checking whether the traffic had cleared enough to cross before finally giving up and walking toward the light. She noticed the deliveryman from the pharmacy reappear without his crates, wipe his forehead with his sleeve and climb into a truck.
There was enough in a street to occupy a person who knew how to look.
Every few minutes someone entered the diner beside her. Jennifer moved when necessary, never forcing anyone to squeeze around her. Once she caught the door before it could swing shut on an elderly woman carrying a cane in one hand and a shopping bag in the other. The woman passed inside with a grateful glance, apparently seeing nothing more remarkable than a stranger who had kept the door from closing.
Through the window she watched the woman settle into a booth. A man near the curb shaded his eyes as though that might help him see around two blocks of brick. Jennifer merely shifted her handbag from one hand to the other.
A taxi drew up beyond the corner and deposited two passengers who immediately walked in the opposite direction. Jennifer's attention followed the vehicle for several seconds before returning to the pavement ahead. She still showed no impatience.
The whole arrangement had something almost improbable about it. Somewhere nearby, barriers had been erected, microphones checked, seats filled and reporters gathered around a man asking thousands of strangers to make him President of the United States. Several streets away, his wife stood alone beneath a diner awning while nobody recognized her.
A cyclist came past too close to the curb and rang his bell sharply at a pedestrian stepping into his path. The sound startled a pigeon from beneath a bench. It flew low across the road, wings beating hard, and landed on the roof of a parked sedan. Jennifer watched it settle. She pushed one loose strand of hair behind her ear.
There had been photographs of her often enough by then. Some flattering, some awkward, some caught when she had been looking elsewhere. There were photographs in which cameras seemed to have discovered her only because Ted stood beside her, and others in which the photographer had decided her reaction mattered more than whatever was happening beyond the frame. None of that followed her here. The people of Lake Street were going home, buying prescriptions, meeting friends, carrying groceries, shepherding children through the heat. The blonde woman beside the diner door had no claim upon their attention, and they offered none.
Jennifer looked entirely comfortable inside that anonymity.
She was not disguised. There were no dark glasses, no scarf drawn conspicuously around her hair, no attempt to make herself look unlike herself. She simply had the strange advantage of being famous only when someone had been prompted to remember that she was. Without Ted beside her, without a stage beneath her feet, without a guitar against her body or a reporter saying her name, she could still disappear into the ordinary scale of a weekday street.
Her small stature helped. People looked over her more often than at her.
A group of four men approached from the direction of the speech, identifiable before anything else by their loosened ties and the rectangular press credentials hanging against their shirts. Jennifer's eyes moved toward them briefly. They were discussing something among themselves, one gesturing with a folded notebook while another laughed and shook his head. They passed directly in front of her. One came close enough that the edge of his jacket brushed the air near her arm.
Their arrival changed the atmosphere inside more than outside. They occupied a booth near the rear, immediately spreading newspapers and notebooks across the table. One began talking with both hands before the waitress had even reached them. Another looked through the window toward the street several times, apparently searching for someone. His gaze passed over Jennifer. It continued onward.
She turned her attention east again.
Clouds had begun gathering in thin streaks high above the buildings, bright rather than threatening. The sunlight remained strong enough to make windshields flare whenever cars turned through the intersection. Shadows had lengthened slightly since Jennifer arrived. The diner's awning now covered more of the pavement, giving her room to shift farther from the door without stepping back into the sun.
She moved perhaps two feet.
That was enough to change the entire reflection in the window. Instead of traffic behind her, she now saw the opposite row of storefronts and a fragment of sky. Her own pale silhouette sat between them. Someone inside raised a coffee cup. A waitress passed across Jennifer's reflected shoulder.
The street continued.
Another bus came through, louder than the first. It stopped almost directly across from the diner and obscured Jennifer's view for half a minute, filling the other side of Lake Street with cream-painted metal and rectangular windows. Faces sat briefly framed inside them: a woman reading, a boy asleep against the glass, a man staring blankly ahead. The bus pulled away and restored the street as though a curtain had been raised.
Jennifer's eyes returned immediately to the newly revealed pavement.
Nothing yet.
She drew a slow breath. The day smelled of hot concrete, gasoline, coffee and something sugary escaping whenever the diner's door opened. Every so often the breeze brought a trace of cut grass from somewhere beyond the commercial strip, so faint it was almost lost beneath the road.
The town around her was not still enough to become picturesque. Lake Street remained useful, busy, ordinary. Cars changed lanes. Deliveries arrived. People complained silently at pedestrian signals. Someone dropped a coin and bent quickly after it. A little girl resisted her mother's hand long enough to inspect a display of shoes through the shop window before being coaxed onward.
Jennifer watched the child press close to the glass. For a moment the little girl noticed Jennifer's reflection beside her own. She looked back over her shoulder. Jennifer smiled. The girl smiled automatically in return, then trotted after her mother.
Two young men crossed against the light and jogged the final yards when a horn protested. A woman carrying a leather handbag came toward the diner and walked past.
At the far end where the afternoon glare pooled white over windshields and shopfront glass, Phoebe came into view between the moving bodies on the pavement. She was unmistakable before anyone had a clear view of her face. The crowd around her did not part theatrically, and she made no effort to make it do so; she simply occupied her line through it with the confidence of someone who expected the world to accommodate ordinary forward motion.
People adjusted by inches. A shoulder turned here, a shopping bag shifted there, a man stepping out from a storefront checked himself before crossing directly in front of her. Phoebe kept the same pace through all of it, neither hurrying nor drifting, the measured rhythm of her heels sounding faintly whenever traffic softened enough to let smaller noises through.
She wore a pale cream sleeveless dress cut close through the bodice and waist before opening into a full skirt that moved cleanly around her knees with every step. The cloth had enough weight to hold its shape without looking stiff, the skirt lifting only slightly when the breeze found it and then settling at once. A narrow belt in a deep wine red marked her waist, matched by pointed leather pumps with a moderate heel and a structured handbag carried low in one hand. The dress was simple only from a distance. Closer inspection showed the fine vertical seaming through the bodice, the small covered buttons at one shoulder, the care with which the hem had been finished and the faint sheen that appeared over the fabric when she crossed through direct sunlight.
A lightweight silk scarf was tied close at her throat, cream at its centre with a border of dark red and black printed in a restrained geometric pattern. One end lay over her collarbone and stirred against the dress as she walked. Gold hoops caught the sun when she turned her head sufficiently for them to emerge from beneath her hair. A slim watch sat at one wrist beside a narrow bracelet. Her nails were lacquered a dark glossy red that repeated the belt without making the correspondence look planned too carefully. The handbag hardware flashed once as she shifted her grip to pass a slower pair of pedestrians and then settled again against the line of her skirt.
Her hair had been arranged with the same attention without becoming precious about it. The dark mass had been brushed smooth and set away from her face, shaped into polished waves that held despite the heat, with the ends gathered neatly behind her shoulders. Nothing had been lacquered into immobility; when a gust travelled down the street, a few strands moved freely near her temple and then fell back into place.
Oversized sunglasses covered her eyes, black frames with a slight upward sweep at the outer corners, large enough to cast a faint shadow over the tops of her cheeks. The lenses reflected the pavement ahead in miniature—cars, awnings, patches of sun, moving legs—without ever betraying where her attention rested.
Lipstick completed the face beneath them, deep red rather than bright, the line exact but not severe. There was powder against the heat, a little colour high on the cheeks, and nothing about the effect suggested that she had spent the morning deciding how she ought to appear to whoever might be waiting with a camera. She looked finished because that was how she preferred to look. The dress fitted because she liked beautiful clothes. The shoes, scarf, handbag, sunglasses and lipstick belonged together because Phoebe had always understood how things belonged together. Had Lake Street been empty, she would have worn the same thing and walked at the same speed.
The first camera lifted when she was still half a block away.
A man had stationed himself near the edge of the awning outside the pharmacy, his jacket folded over one forearm despite the heat and a camera hanging from his neck on a broad leather strap. Another camera rested inside an open bag by his feet beside several empty paper coffee cups crushed slightly around the rims. He had chosen his position carefully. From there he could catch anyone approaching along Lake Street with the diner frontage behind them, enough depth to the pavement for a full-length frame before the subject reached the doorway.
The pharmacist had stepped outside twice and stopped noticing him after the first. The handbag shop clerk had glanced at him whenever she changed the window arrangement. A parking attendant had exchanged a few words with him earlier and gone back to writing tickets. The man himself had shifted between standing, leaning against the brick and crouching briefly to inspect the contents of his bag. His shirt had darkened between the shoulders. He had removed his tie at some point and stuffed it carelessly into one pocket. The coffee had long since disappeared. He had spent the past hour looking at every dark-haired woman approaching from the east, lifting his chin a fraction, deciding against her and returning to the restless wait.
Now he straightened. The camera came up against his face. Phoebe continued.
He adjusted his stance and took one shot from a distance, the shutter giving its quick mechanical snap. Then another. He stepped closer to the curb for a clearer angle past two women carrying shopping bags and raised the camera again. Phoebe's sunglasses remained pointed down the street. She gave no indication that the small black circle aimed at her had altered the afternoon by so much as a degree.
The photographer backed several steps as she approached, placing himself in the route he had imagined for her. His attention narrowed through the viewfinder. He was looking for the familiar small concessions public people made to the camera even when pretending they had not noticed it: the slight easing of pace, the head angling toward the lens, the shoulders drawing themselves into a cleaner line, the mouth preparing itself for whatever expression would reproduce well tomorrow morning. He left space for that moment to happen. It did not.
Phoebe walked on.
Her heel landed, skirt swung, heel landed again. The scarf moved softly at her throat. Her handbag remained at her side. The sunglasses faced ahead. She passed beneath the bright reflected flare thrown from the pharmacy window and into the strip of shadow cast by the building, then came back into sunlight without changing the arrangement of her body for either.
The photographer took another frame and lowered the camera just enough to look over it. Phoebe closed the remaining distance.
He shifted sideways, apparently assuming he had misjudged where she meant to stop. There was enough room beside him for her to pass, though not much, and she used precisely that amount. She neither brushed him nor gave him the extravagant berth that would have acknowledged his presence in another way. Her path curved by perhaps half a step and straightened again as soon as he was behind her.
The camera dropped completely from his face. “Jesus, Phoebe, couldn't you stop for just one photo? I've been standing here for over an hour.”
She made either glance nor pause. “Fuck off.”
The words left her easily, at the same volume she might have used to answer a question about the time.
The pavement narrowed briefly beside a sandwich board placed outside a travel agency, and she passed between it and an approaching couple without breaking pace, her shoulder turning only enough to preserve the line of the dress.
An older woman coming the other way looked twice at her. The first glance took in the clothes. The second recognized the face behind the sunglasses. Phoebe was already past before recognition had time to become action.
A group of young men near the corner noticed her next. One nudged another and pointed with two fingers held close to his side, more discreetly than he probably realized. Their heads turned almost together. Phoebe crossed in front of them, her heel striking a patch of pavement darkened by an old spill, and continued without acknowledging the little wave of attention following her.
There was no stiffening in her shoulders, no deliberately frozen face, none of the brittle concentration of someone forcing herself not to react. Her body remained easy. When the breeze lifted the scarf at her throat, she caught one end between two fingers and settled it again without slowing. When the pavement rose slightly around a badly repaired seam, she adjusted her footing without looking down. At the intersection she waited for a car already committed to the turn, one hand resting lightly over the clasp of her handbag, then stepped forward the instant it cleared.
The sunglasses hid the ordinary movement of her eyes, but nothing else about her suggested concealment. She looked neither hunted nor pleased by the attention. The lenses were simply sunglasses on a bright August afternoon, worn by a woman who had been wearing sunglasses long before anyone decided that photographing her arrival somewhere constituted an afternoon's employment.
Jennifer heard the photographer’s complaint before she saw the lady herself. His voice carried down the Lake Street through a temporary thinning of traffic, irritated and breathless enough to rise above the tyres and engines. Jennifer's eyes followed the voice toward the pharmacy, where the man stood with his camera lowered from his face and one hand spread helplessly toward the figure already passing him.
The response hadn’t been hurled. There was no sharp twist of her shoulders, no hand raised in dismissal, no sudden acceleration once they were spoken. One heel came down in front of the other at precisely the same pace as before, her skirt moving around her knees and the dark red belt holding its clean line at her waist. The photographer remained behind her with his camera hanging against his chest while Phoebe continued along the pavement as though the exchange had taken no more out of the afternoon than stepping around a crack.
Jennifer's lips curved before she could quite help it. She did not look toward the photographer to see what he made of the answer. Her eyes stayed on Phoebe.
From a distance the photographs had done her justice only in the most superficial sense. Jennifer had seen the dark hair, the immaculate face, the dresses and skirts that seemed always chosen with a sure hand, but paper had taken the movement out of everything. The woman coming toward her wore the dress as naturally as somebody else might have worn an old cotton blouse. Its fitted bodice followed her figure without fuss, opening below the narrow wine-red belt into a fuller skirt that stirred with every step. A patterned scarf lay close at her throat. Gold caught briefly at her ears whenever the sun reached beneath her hair. Her handbag hung from one hand, steady beside her hip, while dark sunglasses covered her eyes and turned the bright street into glossy reflections across the lenses.
Jennifer's smile remained small, but it warmed.
A bus moved between them for several seconds, broad and noisy enough to cover nearly the whole opposite side of the street. Jennifer waited beneath the diner's awning until its rear cleared the intersection, and Phoebe appeared again on the other side of it without any sense that the interruption had mattered. She crossed through a patch of sunlight and then beneath the shadow of another awning, dark glasses still in place, one hand lifting briefly to keep the end of her scarf from turning over in the breeze.
Jennifer watched the way people noticed her. A woman leaving a shop looked once at the dress and then again at Phoebe's face. Two young men farther down the pavement nudged one another without approaching. A man standing beside a newspaper box followed her for several seconds with his eyes. Phoebe seemed to collect the looks without carrying any of them. Her stride did not lengthen under scrutiny or soften beneath admiration. She simply came on.
The photographer's complaint remained pleasantly in Jennifer's mind. It was not the profanity itself that held there. Jennifer had heard enough coarse language over the years that four letters arranged in that particular order possessed very little power to startle her. It was the ease of it. Phoebe had not made herself angry for the benefit of the insult, nor had she dressed irritation in prettier words because there was a camera within reach. The man had wanted something from her. She had not wanted to give it. The matter had been disposed of in two words and one uninterrupted step.
For several days, Phoebe had existed in pieces. Her name had moved through rooms before Jennifer ever had the chance to attach a voice to it. Staff had discussed schedules involving her, reporters had speculated about her, Ted had spoken about her with that particular concentration, reserved for the most pertinent. Photographs had supplied the face. None of it had quite prepared Jennifer for the woman who had just told a waiting photographer to fuck off without even granting him the courtesy of slowing down.
Phoebe reached the next stretch of pavement and finally looked toward the diner. Her head turned only a little at first. Then it stopped. Jennifer knew the exact instant she had been spotted.
Phoebe's hand rose toward her sunglasses. She took them by one corner and pushed them smoothly upward, settling them atop her head among the dark waves of her hair. Her eyes narrowed for a moment against the unfiltered afternoon glare before finding Jennifer again, and the change in her face was immediate. The composed expression she had carried past the photographers opened into a smile.
She lifted her hand.
Jennifer raised hers in return, fingers moving in a small wave from beneath the awning. Her own smile widened almost despite the restraint with which it had begun. Phoebe was still several shopfronts away, yet the gesture stripped something formal from the meeting before it had started. Jennifer lowered her hand again and watched Phoebe continue toward her.
She had found Jennifer; that was enough. There was no need to transform the last yards into a performance of enthusiasm. Phoebe continued at the same natural pace that had carried her past cameras and strangers, her cream skirt shifting softly around her legs as she passed through alternating bands of shade and sun. Once she stepped aside for an older couple approaching abreast, then returned immediately to her original line. Her eyes came back to Jennifer and stayed there.
Up close, the glamour became less polished rather than more. A little warmth had broken through the powder at Phoebe's cheeks. The sunglasses had left faint marks beside the bridge of her nose. One dark strand had loosened near her temple despite the careful arrangement of her hair. Jennifer saw all three before she noticed the jewellery again, and liked the face better for them.
Phoebe's attention no longer belonged to the street. A camera clicked somewhere behind her and produced no reaction. Someone passing in the opposite direction recognized her and slowed half a step; Phoebe did not appear to notice. The same woman who had refused even a backward glance to a man who had waited an hour for her photograph now looked directly at Jennifer as though there were no reason to divide her attention.
Jennifer stood a little straighter without thinking. Her handbag remained held loosely against one leg, her pale dress considerably plainer beside the approaching cream and wine-red elegance. At four-foot-eleven she had already watched plenty of people discover her height before they discovered anything else. Phoebe's gaze touched her face and stayed there.
When Phoebe reached her, she stopped.
No glance went toward the diner door. She did not look beyond Jennifer in search of an aide or someone more obviously connected with the campaign. She simply came to rest directly in front of her, close enough that Jennifer caught the faint trace of perfume warmed by the August air.
“Jennifer,” Phoebe said, smiling. “So wonderful to meet you.”
Jennifer's answering smile showed more readily now. “Phoebe.” A pause, then a gently added rehearsed but not mechanical. “Shalom.”
The street moved around them, people passing at their backs and the diner's windows carrying pale reflections of both women over the booths inside. Jennifer's gaze briefly caught the sunglasses resting in Phoebe's hair, then returned to her eyes. There was something deeply satisfying about finding no visible seam between the woman who had walked down the street and the one now standing before her.
Phoebe stepped nearer and slipped her arm through Jennifer's. The gesture came without ceremony, warm and familiar enough to make a handshake suddenly seem absurdly formal. Jennifer accommodated it at once, turning slightly toward her as their elbows linked. Phoebe's bracelet brushed lightly against Jennifer's forearm, and the considerable difference in their height required a small adjustment from both of them before their arms settled comfortably together. Neither remarked upon it.
Jennifer glanced once at Phoebe's face, still carrying the quiet remnants of that delighted smile. Phoebe had barely been in front of her for half a minute. Jennifer still knew almost nothing about how the conversation inside would unfold, what silences Phoebe preferred, what irritated her beyond photographers who believed waiting created an obligation, or what Ted had seen across all the conversations that had led him to offer her a place beside him on the ticket. She did not need any of that answered on the pavement.
Phoebe reached for the diner's chrome handle with her free hand while keeping the other arm linked through Jennifer's. The glass gave them back a brief reflection: pale hair beside dark, Jennifer's smaller figure tucked naturally against Phoebe's cream dress, both faces turned toward the doorway. Then the door swung inward and cool air rolled over them carrying coffee, hot grease and pie.