The family stood up and, without discussion, the girl bundled up in her father’s arms, left the restaurant. Their exit brought in a blast of cold air and a quick glimpse of the outside space. The car park, the street lamps, the fluorescent restaurant sign – soon they would be gone. And then the restaurant itself, and whatever followed after that and after that. It would all go.

A wail silenced the restaurant. A teenage body lay unconscious on the floor. The waiters gathered cautiously around their brother, as if shocked by consequences at a time when there weren’t supposed to be any consequences.

Angela stared directly at her guest. ‘I had wanted him to stay, you know,’ she said. ‘But I didn’t know how to say that. That one word seemed like a big word. I couldn’t find a way into it. And I was afraid of what might happen if I even tried.’

He sat up straight, smiled wanly in her direction.

‘Don’t look too delighted,’ she said. ‘I took him to the cleaners in the divorce. Got the car and everything.’

Her guest put down his fork, struggling for the words like a man who has spent a long time without company, living alone in an apartment complex with other men who live alone.

*

The car dealership was on the outskirts of town. She expected to find it abandoned, but no – through the windscreen she watched the man behind the counter swinging gloomily on his swing chair. He had the look of someone who might have debated wearing a cowboy hat to hawk his goods, but was persuaded out of it by a sensible person aware of cowboy hats and what they could do to a man’s reputation. The tinkling bell announced the arrival of Angela – a tall woman, a handsome woman, a woman with a cat peeking out from underneath her coat – and the counter-man’s disappointment was plain. He would not be able to tell Angela what he told men: that cars brought a certain type of life, a certain type of woman, a certain type of insane luck. Angela just wanted to sit in a car for one last time, enjoy the new car smell, and not feel fear or disappointment. In the window of the car dealership there was a convertible rotating sleekly in defiance of all the outside decay.

‘How much is that?’ she asked.

The man, his belly swinging bountifully, spread his arms out wide, a move Angela suspected he had been practising in new and used cars during his downtime. It was a clear and direct arm-spread: it said, ‘Angela, you are going to love it. You probably dismissed the sports car experience at some stage, we all have. You probably have thought – that’s not for me. But you’re going to adore it. Every last bitter second.’