“All right. Didn’t mean to doubt,” John said briskly. “Look, if she reaches out to you in the next few weeks, about anything, just let me know, all right?”

“Is everything all right?”

For a moment, Maddox sounded just like John himself, that hoarse voice that had apparently originally belonged to their grandfather, though John hadn’t met him before he’d died.

“Yes. She’s just being a pain and trying to manipulate me into something. Using you.”

“Okay...” Maddox laughed and there was a current of pain injected into the sound. “At least your mother cares about you enough to manipulate you.”

It was true that Maddox’s mother, Melody, was less than attentive.

“True,” John agreed carefully. He and Maddox had muddled their way through the last decade, never quite sure how to talk about the many dissonances in their family, their separate childhoods, the awkwardness of their age difference. But they did all right.

“Dinner next week?” John asked.

“Can’t. I’m out of town.”

John heard muttering again, a woman’s voice. He sighed and didn’t ask any questions.

“All right. Call me when you’re back in town.”

“You got it.”

John hung up the call and tapped his cell phone on his thigh. It was a nice night. The sky was still streaked a reckless pink from the sunset and the air was heavy with the potential of a thunderstorm.

Maybe he should take the train to Cobble Hill and explain to Mary in person about all of this. He knew that at least last Friday she’d been working this late. He thought of how her shop had glittered like a lantern once the sun went down. Warmth and light spilled from the window onto the sidewalk, banishing the bad moods of any who dared enter there.

He felt pulled toward her shop and her neighborhood. But he’d walked half a block toward the F train when he registered just how much his shirt was sticking to him. He’d come from work and his dress shoes were pinching his feet after a long day. He was a week past needing a haircut and he probably had guac breath.

He’d once watched The Little Mermaid and the image of the poor unfortunate souls trapped in Ursula’s lair popped up into John’s head. He pictured himself walking, disheveled and sweaty, into Mary’s glowing, lovely shop and just sort of shrinking down into a big-eyed worm creature, blinking in the light of her goodness.

Yeah. It would be better just to give her a call once he got home.

John turned on his heel and instead caught the G train. He didn’t interrogate himself too closely as to why he brushed his teeth and showered before he sat down at his kitchen table and called Mary. Maybe he was tired of feeling like a grouchy schlub where she was concerned.