“Okay. Thanks for the help.”
Mrs. Mahoney gave me a look. She hadn’t offered me any help, so she wasn’t sure how to respond. I smiled and headed upstairs. Take that, Mrs. Mahoney. I have dealt with too many New York neighbors with social anxiety or rage issues to be intimidated by one grumpy Canadian. I would woo and win her affection eventually; it was just a matter of time.
By the time Thursday rolled around, I was more excited than I should have been to be going to an improv show. The show was being held in a small music venue called the Puffin Hut down by the waterfront. I recognized the kind of place immediately when I walked in the door: the walls painted black, the small rack of ceiling pipes holding scant theatrical lighting pointed at a stage just large enough for a five-person garage band, the cafe tables with wobbly legs, easy enough to move aside for dance space, easy to slide back for a poetry reading. There were about thirty people in the crowd—not enough to fill the room, but not empty, either. I saw on the small hand-written poster for the evening that the Newfingers were wedged between a few other acts: someone named Lachlan Allen, someone named Raahid, and then someone I guessed was a singer named Amber Sorelli.
I was about to take my seat at one of the precarious little tables about ten feet from the stage, when Lisette spied me from where she’d been sitting in the corner and bounced over.
“You’re here!” She made it sound like she’d spotted a celebrity.
“Yes, I made it!”
“Come sit with us!”
“Don’t you have to get ready?”
“No. There’s a folk musician up first. And anyway, the whole idea with improv is that you don’t get ready. If you’re thinking ahead, you’re terrible.”
A folk musician? Of course. Suffering through improv would not be enough to fill an evening; I was getting a full, multi-course meal of cringing in my chair. Lisette dragged me over to where she was sitting with Paul and introduced me to Mark, who was wearing an oversized checked shirt and holding a pint of beer. Mark looked me up and down once and raised his eyebrows.
“Where are you from?” he asked brusquely.
“Brooklyn.”
“Brooklyn!” he replied. “What the hell are you doing all the way up here?”
“Plotting against the locals,” I replied. Mark gave me a half-smile, but I got the sense that it slipped out of him unwillingly.
“Of course,” he muttered.
Paul’s eyes were on me when I sat down. “The plan is to be our nemesis, then?” he asked. I had that same odd feeling, like I could read him perfectly, like he was an old friend.
“You’ll never be sure. That’s half the fun.”
“It’s all fun and games until we’re going over Reichenbach Falls together,” he replied.
“Whichever one of us crawls back from certain death is the winner.”
“Sounds like your marriage, Paul,” Mark drawled.
Just then, a young man tapped the mic from the stage. He strummed his acoustic guitar and then adjusted the microphone height.
“Here we go,” Paul said drily. “Good old Lachlan.”
I turned to Paul. “You own all his albums, then?”
Paul chuckled. “Just my workout playlist.”
The handsome young singer began speaking. “This is a story about a massacre of miners in 1931 by the Canadian government.”
I met Paul’s eyes, and he grinned again as the earnest young man began to sing about the union-busting Canadian Mounties. “Bodies falling one by one, Tumbling with the setting sun,” the young man sang, emphasizing the tragedy with each chord. Poor Newfingers, having to leap to the stage after the world’s most mournful history lesson.
“So that’s a metaphor for getting laid, right?” I whispered.
Mark leaned over. “You think you’re kidding, but he brings down the room and then manages to take home the hottest woman in the room, every time.”
“I’ll get my coat,” I joked.
“Good God,” Mark said to Paul. “Abigail here has a sense of humor. We usually don’t get that in our audience members.”
