I recognized this one. Mozart, Clarinet Quintet in A. Memory is peculiar, I had that one down to the key it was played in. Lauren probably didn’t know that, but she knew a lot of other things about music that I didn’t know, knew so much that it made me wonder where she had picked it up. Lauren could talk about classical music with Erin for hours. They’d say things like, The late quartets of Beethoven, and throw German and Italian words at each other. Comparisons, meta-concepts of music; composers, conductors, soloists, “pieces.”

I looked up from my diary and watched her stir eggs in the big cast iron pan. A fat, shiny carabiner dangled off one of her belt loops on the left side of her hips, just below where the band of her underwear was visible — a white line of elastic with a thin red stripe running through it. She hadn’t shaved her face or plucked her eyebrows in what had to have been at least a few days — there was a faint smear of mascara below her left eye that seemed to extend one of her dark circles into the space between her nose and her cheekbone. I realized that I could just about decide which version of her I wanted to see, shifting her under my eyes. Boy Lauren, Girl Lauren. I shooed that thought away.

She brought two plates over to the table — over-medium eggs and green salsa balanced over strips of fried corn tortillas. That and two mugs of coffee.

“Did Erin already leave?” she said.

“Yeah,” I said. “This is nice of you, by the way.”

“I make this, like, at least once a week,” she said through a mouthful of it. “It’s, like, automatic for me.”

“Thank you,” I mumbled. It was delicious, filling and warming. I let myself finish the whole plate.

“Amine told me you’re the easiest move he’s helped with,” Lauren said. “He was like, ‘she lives like a monk,’” she said.

“I do,” I said simply.

She looked at me strangely but then returned to her plate. You don’t want to talk that much that early in the morning, with the long walk to work fixed ahead of you in your mind. When we finished she took the plates to the sink and refilled my coffee. Her back flexed as she moved a sponge in a circle around the plates, and then the pan. The dishes done, she poured the rest of the coffee into a Thermos and walked over to the window, gingerly took a half-full pipe of weed off the sill.