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will.’
    ‘
Nope.
’
    We both paused. I hadn’t meant to say it like that.
    ‘Okay, maybe you won’t,’ Jacob said finally. ‘Okay. I can tell – you’re a woman with willpower. Balls of steel.’
    He called me a woman.
    ‘So, tomorrow, then?’ he said.
    ‘Tomorrow what?’
    ‘Coffee.’
    I looked at his face, the slant of kid’s eyes I’d caught. ‘How did you recognize me?’ I asked.
    He tilted his head to the side, slightly.
    ‘You look the same,’ he said. ‘I remember, that second year, you started to have your own change room. You were so small. I thought you might be lonely.’
    W hile the liver hissed in the frying pan, filling the house with the smell of cooked blood, two people won brand-new cars. First, the blond trollop whose laughter sounded like a baby bird plummeting from a nest to its death on the ground. Then the college boy with the crewcut and gold chains and abuse of the thumbs-up sign, who, when Bob Barker asked his name, bent so he was practically eating the microphone and screamed, ‘Eagles rule!,’ triggering a small uprising in the back row of the studio audience, visibly drunk hooligans in matching college sweatshirts, each with a huge red hole in his face where a civilized mouth should have been. When the boy opened the door to that brand-new car and stepped in, screaming non-language into Bob Barker’s extended microphone, a dark cloud gathered above Sig’s dinner plate, throwing a shadow over the gelatinous patch of liver, over the pea rubble, and when she chewed the food and swallowed, this darkness slid down into her stomach.
    She threw a chunk of liver to Jack, resident golden retriever, then pushed her plate to the edge of the TV table and tallied a list of all the people she knew who deserved brand-new cars above theseidiots. She saw Iz popping the trunk, throwing in her hockey gear, picking up a couple of teammates on the way to a game, music pouring golden from the CD player onto their laps, the car’s shining red curves articulating the shape of their laughter. The college boy brayed, voice cracking. Sig slammed her thumb into the remote and threw it to the ground and the TV inhaled all the bright flares of voices and laughter and applause and held them there in its dark, obstinate stomach, and the house caved in on her once again.
    Dwarfed in Buck’s armchair, the sky still dribbling dirty light through the window, Sig fell asleep because, she thought angrily as she let herself drift away – up toward the ceiling spangled with brand-new cars and Iz and all the negative space surrounding a slab of lonely liver – this is what old people do.
    H ot chocolate with whipped cream, not coffee. From the Tim Hortons in the food court. Jacob drank his coffee black and tall, and when he ordered it, speaking this language of coffee, he became instantly older.
    He needed a textbook. I followed him to the Used Book Store, in one of the tunnels that spread like roots beneath the campus, where he said everyone fled in the winter.
    ‘Rocks for jocks,’ he said, holding up a textbook in the geology section, the two of us small among the shelves of books, yellow
Used
stickers crooked vaccinations on dulled spines. ‘And it’s kinda sad, but it really is that. It’s obscene. Back row’s all football and about five of us hockey guys wanted to take it together, so we’re all there. A couple of the basketball guys. You know, no one’ll ever show anyway, so.’ He snorted, flipped through the book, put it back. Picked up another.
    ‘Looking for something?’ I said.
    Jacob looked down at the book in his hand. ‘I’m looking for the one I like best,’ he said.
    I paused. ‘Aren’t they all the same?’
    ‘No. Here.’ Jacob picked up another book, flipped through it quickly, handed it to me, and reached for another.
    ‘This one,’ he said and waved the book he held. ‘See? This one’s it.’
    He handed the book to me, and I turned it over in my hand.
    ‘It looks