“It’s Baz. Come eat the project. Worst case you watch a man fail at dinner, which is its own entertainment.”
Another block. Then, to the glass and not to me, “Okay.”
“Okay?”
“For the cabinet video.”
“Sure,” I say, and leave it there, because making it a thing is the fastest way to watch him change his mind. “For the video.”
Baz opens the door, already mid-sentence. “...the recipe said forty minutes and the recipe has never met my oven, my oven is a documented liar, I’ve filed complaints. Oh. Soucy. Hey. You came. Tikh, Soucy came.”
“Heard,” Tikh says from the couch without turning around. He lifts a hand. “Soucy.”
“Volkov.”
“Shoes wherever. Don’t let Bug into the hall, she thinks it’s a frontier.”
The place is warm and smells like whatever the project is, and there’s a game already up on the TV, the late series out west, two teams we’d both happily watch lose.
Soucy does the thing he does in a new room. The half-second map. Then he takes the armchair in the corner where the sightline covers the door and the screen at once, and nobody comes at his elbow. I clock him picking it without picking it. I’ve watched him pick a chair the exact same way in eleven rooms this year.
Baz hands me a beer and Soucy water without asking either of us, the one thing Baz does without noise. “Sit, sit. The project needs eight more minutes, it’s at a delicate stage.”
“Show them the video,” Tikh says. “He’s been waiting all day to show someone.”
“I’ve been curating.” But Baz is already shoving his phone at us, dropping onto the couch arm against Tikh’s shoulder. “Watch her little paws. Watch the commitment.”
On the screen Bug stands on her hind legs and hooks one paw under the cabinet door. She works it open with the patience of a safecracker.
“She’s been planning that,” Soucy says.
“For weeks,” Baz says. “Tikh thinks it’s a phase.”
“It is not a phase, it is a security problem,” Tikh says. “I have moved the treats twice. She finds them. She is smarter than the latch.”
“She’s smarter than you and that’s all she needs,” Soucy says, flat. Baz howls.
Tikh points at the dark screen of his own phone without any heat in it. “She is smarter than all of us. That is the actual problem. The cat has a plan and I do not.”
On the TV, the western goalie gives up a soft one, glove side. Tikh makes a low, disgusted sound.
“He’s cheating his glove,” Soucy says.
“He has cheated his glove his entire career,” Tikh says. “It is a personality, not a flaw.”
“It’s a flaw he decided to keep.”
“That is what a personality is.”
Soucy’s mouth does the almost-thing, and Baz aims a wooden spoon at him. “See, this is why you have to come more. He’s funny. Lundy, did you know he was funny?”
“I knew.”
“Everyone knew,” Tikh says.
“I’m the last to know everything.” The oven goes off. Baz vaults up and comes back carrying a dish that’s either a triumph or a crime, steam rolling off it. He sets it down like a verdict. “Okay. It’s viable. I’m naming it. It’s a deconstructed thing.”
“It’s a casserole that fell over,” Tikh says.
