uncharitably took for a simper, and felt guilty about it immediately afterward. He returned the thumbs up and then took off after Mimi, who’d already started down Augusta, headed for Queen Street.

“What’s the cover charge?” he said, once he’d caught up.

“Twenty bucks,” she said. “It’s an all-ages show, so they won’t be selling a lot of booze, so there’s a high cover.”

“How’s the play coming?”

“Fuck off about the play, okay?” she said, and spat on the sidewalk.

“All right, then,” he said. “I’m going to start writing my story tomorrow,” he said.

“Your story, huh?”

“Yup.”

“What’s that for?”

“What do you mean?” he asked playfully.

“Why are you writing a story?”

“Well, I have to! I’ve completely redone the house, built that soundwall—it’d be a shame not to write the story now.”

“You’re writing a story about your house?”

“No, in my house. I haven’t decided what the story’s about yet. That’ll be job one tomorrow.”

“You did all that work to have a place to write? Man, I thought I was into procrastination.”

He chuckled self-deprecatingly. “I guess you could look at it that way. I just wanted to have a nice, creative environment to work in. The story’s important to me, is all.”

“What are you going to do with it once you’re done? There aren’t a whole lot of places that publish short stories these days, you know.”

“Oh, I know it! I’d write a novel if I had the patience. But this isn’t for publication—yet. It’s going into a drawer to be published after I die.”

“What?”

“Like Emily Dickinson. Wrote thousands of 

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