Chapter 16: Roadblock
"Of course not." Bonnie's voice came out muffled, her face pressed into the couch cushion. "Those guys went through everything — threw my bags out into the street, showed up at Christie's school and made a scene in the middle of the parking lot. If I hadn't gotten there when I did—" She stopped. Didn't finish it.
Andrew didn't push. If there had been luggage to retrieve he would have helped with that, but there wasn't, and he wasn't in a position to replace what was gone. The math was simple and depressing: he had forty-seven dollars and a grocery receipt.
He left her on the couch and went to the kitchen.
She was fidgeting in that particular way — repositioning every thirty seconds, picking up her phone and putting it back down, tapping her fingers against the armrest. He recognized it. Nicotine, probably. Maybe something else. The specific craving didn't matter much; the behavior was the same either way. The best thing he could do was let her work through it and not make it an event.
He pulled the steaks from the refrigerator — the ones he'd bought on sale yesterday, already marinated overnight in olive oil, garlic, and Worcestershire — and got a cast iron pan heating on the back burner. While it came up to temperature he threw together a salad: romaine, cherry tomatoes, red onion, a quick lemon vinaigrette. Nothing fancy. Dinner didn't need to be fancy; it needed to exist.
Christie emerged from the bedroom just as he was pulling the steaks to rest, drawn out by the smell the way kids always were. She climbed into her chair and sat very properly with her hands in her lap, watching him plate everything with the focused attention of someone keeping score.
Bonnie dragged herself to the table a minute later, dropping into her chair like the walk from the couch had cost her something.
It was better than the night before. Nobody was eating in silence with their eyes fixed on their plates — there was actual conversation, Bonnie asking him how he'd ended up in New York, Andrew giving the short version,
Bonnie offering a few dry observations about the city that suggested she'd spent real time here before things went sideways. Christie didn't say much, but she wasn't withdrawn the way she'd been. She ate a full plate. That felt like progress.
"I'm done." Andrew pushed back his chair and reached for his guitar case, which was leaning against the wall by the door where he always kept it. "Bonnie — dishes."
She looked at the stack like it had personally wronged her. "I cooked all week in that apartment."
"You didn't cook anything tonight."
A pause. "Fine."
He took the long way to the bar, cutting through the park. It was a habit he'd developed — the walk helped him settle into the right headspace before a set, cleared out whatever domestic noise was rattling around in his head and left him somewhere quieter.
Except tonight the quiet felt off.
Twice he had the distinct sense of being followed — not a sound exactly, more a pressure at the back of his neck, that animal awareness of eyes. He took a detour down a side street, slowed his pace, watched the reflections in a darkened storefront window. Nothing he could identify. He gave it another half block and let it go. New York had a way of making you paranoid if you let it; the city was too dense, too full of people moving in the same direction.
Central Perk was already going when he got there.
Phoebe saw him from across the room and waved with both hands, nearly upsetting her coffee. Chandler was next to her, looking like a man who had decided weeks ago that sleep was for people with fewer opinions.
"Andrew." Chandler raised his mug in greeting. "You look like a man who has recently made several questionable decisions."
"Only the usual number," Andrew said, dropping into the chair across from them.
"Monica's out," Phoebe said. "Catering thing that turned into a whole situation. She sounded very intense on the phone."
"Ross is in Cleveland," Chandler added. "Apparently something significant was dug up and now he's in what I can only describe as a fossil emergency."
"Is that a real kind of emergency?"
"For Ross it is the only kind of emergency."
They talked for a while — easy, comfortable, the kind of conversation that didn't require anything from him. This was what he'd come to look forward to about these nights, honestly more than the playing. The set was work, good work, but this was something else.
When Gunther signaled it was time, Andrew got up, settled the guitar strap on his shoulder, and stepped up.
He wasn't nervous. He hadn't been nervous since the second week, when he'd realized that the room wasn't really listening the way a concert audience listens — they were around him, the music part of the atmosphere rather than the point of it, which was actually easier in some ways. It freed him up.
He played three instrumentals first — let the room settle around the sound — then moved into songs. He'd learned early to stick to folk for the vocal sets. His singing proficiency was still developing; he knew that clearly enough.
But folk was forgiving in the right ways. It wasn't about technical perfection — it was about feel, about whether the person holding the guitar seemed like they meant it. And he did mean it, which apparently read.
His voice was a clean baritone, naturally warm, and he'd been careful with it — no late nights shouting over bar noise, no straining for notes that weren't there. When he reached for the upper register it had that slightly airy quality that women at the tables near the stage seemed to respond to, leaning in a little without quite realizing they were doing it.
An hour. He wrapped up, got a decent round of applause, and stepped down.
Gunther materialized beside him almost immediately with the focused purposefulness he brought to anything involving Andrew's continued presence at the establishment.
"Hey." He held out an envelope. "Boss approved a raise. Seventy extra a week, starting tonight."
Andrew took it. "Seriously?"
"You're getting the Friday-Saturday crowd to stay later." Gunther said it like he was reading from a report. "That's on you." He nodded once and withdrew.
Andrew looked at the envelope. Seventy dollars extra. His brain immediately redistributed it: Target run for Christie, subway card, groceries to replace what they'd gone through this week. Not much left after that.
Better than nothing. Considerably better than nothing.
He found Chandler and Phoebe again. Chandler lasted another twenty minutes before announcing that thirty-one-year-olds needed sleep and departing with a wave. Phoebe showed no such signs of slowing down, nursing her third decaf and people-watching with the cheerful intensity of someone running a private documentary in their head.
"I should head back," Andrew said, getting his jacket. "It's getting late."
"Okay! Bye!" Phoebe beamed. "Stay safe."
The street outside was the particular version of quiet that Manhattan got around midnight — not actually quiet, just a lower register. A few cabs. A couple walking a dog. The ambient hum of a city that never fully exhaled.
Andrew walked with the guitar on his back, hands in his jacket pockets. The air had the sharp, clean smell it got after a cold front moved through.
He heard the footsteps behind him too late.
The man stepped in front of him from a doorway — big, heavyset, a scar running from his jaw toward his left ear. He planted himself in the middle of the sidewalk with the particular stillness of someone who'd done this before and wasn't in a hurry.
"You know a woman named Bonnie?" he said.
Andrew's chest went tight. He kept his face even. "I meet a lot of people."
"Don't." The man's jaw shifted. "We know she came to you. We know her kid went into your building. You're going to tell me where she is, or that kid's going to have a real bad week."
"I don't know what you're talking about." Andrew took a half step back, weight shifting — not retreating, calculating. The guitar case would be useless as anything but a distraction. The man outweighed him by sixty pounds minimum. This was going to go badly if it went physical.
But backing down completely would go worse.
"Hey." Phoebe's voice, from right behind him.
Andrew's stomach dropped. No.
The man's expression shifted — something complicated moving across it. He looked past Andrew at Phoebe. "Phoebe Buffay."
"Danny." Phoebe said it flatly, in a register Andrew had never heard from her before. All the sunshine was gone. "What are you doing all the way up here?"
"Business."
"Not anymore you're not." She came to stand beside Andrew, and the quality of her stillness was completely different from the Phoebe who knocked over coffee cups and talked to her dead mother. "You want me to call Mickey about this? Because I will, and you know how that goes."
The man — Danny — held her gaze for a long moment. Then he looked at Andrew with the specific expression of someone filing information away for later. "We'll talk," he said to Andrew. Not a threat exactly. More like a promise.
He walked away. Neither of them moved until he'd turned the corner.
"Phoebe." Andrew exhaled. "What was that?"
"That was Danny Kowalski." She watched the empty corner for another second, then seemed to come back to herself — the familiar brightness returning like a light switched on. "He runs collection for a crew that operates around this neighborhood. I did some street performing outside their territory like eight years ago, and Mickey — their guy — actually really liked my music, so we have kind of an understanding." A pause. "It's a whole thing."
Andrew looked at her. He kept forgetting, somehow, that Phoebe had lived a genuinely difficult life before the apartment and the coffee shop and the bright scarves — that she'd been homeless at fifteen, that the cheerfulness wasn't naivety, it was something she'd built on top of harder material.
"He's connected to the people after Bonnie," Andrew said.
"Your neighbor." Phoebe nodded slowly, processing. "The one with the little girl."
"She's in some kind of trouble. Serious trouble." He gave her the short version — Christie showing up first, then Bonnie, then the fragments Bonnie had let slip. Phoebe listened without interrupting, which was unusual enough that he knew she was taking it seriously.
"Okay," she said when he finished. "Here's what you do. Tell her she needs to get out of the city — not next week, as soon as possible. And I'll go see Mickey tomorrow and find out what the situation is, see if I can buy you a few days." She paused. "Don't look at me like that."
"I'm not looking at you like anything."
"You're looking at me like I just grew a second head."
"I'm looking at you," Andrew said carefully, "like I'm realizing I've been significantly underestimating you."
Phoebe considered this. "That's fair," she decided, and seemed pleased about it. "Come on. I'll walk with you to your block."
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