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down. Mary shook a cigarette free of her pack and put it between her lips, reaching down in automatic movements to put the car in reverse as her other hand pressed the window button.
    In a matter of seconds, we had both lit up our smokes, and she had pulled out of the parking spot, shifted the car into drive, and started to make her way up the lane, towards the exit. “Another rule: if I’m driving, I’m in charge of the music, and no bitching from you; got it?”
    I laughed. “That’s the rule for the van, too,” I said. “Unless you want to play some fucking ear-bleed Miley Cyrus shit, I won’t complain.” Mary snorted and pulled out of the parking lot and onto the road. She reached blindly into her purse and I watched as she found her phone, shoved the purse back down under her legs in front of her seat, and managed to somehow juggle the cigarette between her fingers, the aux cord, and her phone. She came to a stop at the light and looked down at her screen. After a moment, she selected something and set the phone down in a convenient cubby, taking another drag of her cigarette as the song started: Yeah Yeah Yeahs, “Soft Shock.” I sat back in the seat I’d taken. There didn’t seem to be anything for me to do except watch the scenery pass by, at least for now.

****
    The house that Mary pulled up to was both exactly what I would have expected and completely foreign to me. It was one of those old, old Florida houses; big jalousie windows, clamshell shutters pulled back. The exterior was a warm, cheery yellow; the door was painted a deep, sharp red. “Do you own this place or rent it?” I asked, more to make conversation than anything else.
    “I own it,” Mary said, shifting the car into park and turning off the ignition on the car. “It’s always just a little too warm in the summer and a little to chilly whenever there’s a cold front, but it’s my place outright.”
    I nodded and followed her up the walkway, glancing around the sleepy-looking neighborhood her house was in; the south Florida sun beat down like a hammer, the humidity like a sauna. It was impossible to forget, even in winter, that you lived in a coastal swamp. Mary unlocked the door and opened it, and her security system shrieked as she took the few steps to the console. “Come on in,” she said over her shoulder, punching in her code.
    I stepped through the door, feeling—weirdly—more apprehensive even than I had when I’d walked through the doors of Recovery Now. The floors had almost certainly been redone at some point in the house’s many decades of existence; they were hardwood, instead of standard-issue tile or carpet. There was a beat-up, worn-down rug on the living room floor. Mary had an old, scarred leather sofa with an old lady Afghan thrown over the back, a much newer armchair, and a flat-screen TV on an entertainment center that I guessed probably came from IKEA. The thing that shocked me, though, was the sight of an acoustic guitar, settled on a stand, its strings gleaming. “You play?” I asked her, frowning as I pointed.
    Mary shrugged, and I saw the color rise in her cheeks. “Not very well,” she said. I grinned. “I had pretensions of playing folk-rock when I was a teenager, but I’ve never really been either good enough that my looks didn’t matter or pretty enough that my talent didn’t matter.”
    I laughed. “Which category do I fall under?” I asked, throwing myself down onto the couch. It was even more comfortable than it looked, the cushions almost suspiciously plush under the scarred and scratched exterior. Mary looked at me for a long moment.
    “That rarest of breeds: talented enough and pretty enough,” she said with a wry smile. “Want something to drink? Coffee? Water?”
    “It’s too fucking hot for coffee, but after what just happened, I really want the buzz,” I said, thinking out loud.
    “I’ve got cold brew,” Mary suggested.
    “That, then,” I said, lifting a hand in