St. Mary's Church — July 2010, Wake Day 3, Morning
Marcus Higgins had been explaining the moonwalk's origin story to anyone who'd listen for seven straight hours, and the collective patience of the wake had achieved a state of Zen acceptance that bordered on the religious.
"The key," Marcus told Deanne McKenzie over breakfast, sliding his feet across the tile while holding a paper plate of scrambled eggs, "is the heel-toe transition. Michael got the heel part. I contributed the toe."
Deanne, seven months pregnant and running on the specific reserves of tolerance that expectant mothers develop for the universe's nonsense, nodded once and returned to her eggs.
"Marcus." Kurt set his coffee down with the deliberate care of a man preventing himself from throwing it. "You did not co-invent the moonwalk."
"Kurt, I was there."
"You were FIVE."
"I was five and gifted."
Kurt looked at me. I looked at my coffee. The coffee offered no guidance.
The wake's third morning had the texture of an event running past its natural lifespan. The church ladies were still producing food — a miracle of community infrastructure that could apparently sustain indefinite mourning through casseroles — but the energy had shifted. The first day was grief. The second day was remembrance. The third day was the uncomfortable question nobody wanted to ask: when do we go home?
The five friends and their families were still here, lingering the way you linger when leaving means admitting the reason for staying is over. Lenny had his phone out more — calls he stepped outside for, the agent resurfacing. Eric helped Sally pack up the food table and restock it with the circular devotion of a man who showed love through logistics. Rob and Gloria sat together with the comfortable silence of people who'd been married long enough to not need words. And Marcus moonwalked.
My cooldown timer read 6:22:14. Six hours and change. The longest wait yet, and the fatigue was landing harder now — not just temporal jet lag but the accumulated debt of being awake for nearly fifty hours in a body that wasn't built for this. My eyes burned. My shoulders carried a tension that started at the base of my skull and ran down to the small of my back. The burnt thumb had faded to a dull itch, the kind of minor injury that heals itself while you're busy breaking larger things.
Kurt volunteered for a supply run around nine. The wake needed paper plates, napkins, coffee, and a reason for Kurt to get away from Mama Ronzoni, who had opinions about the napkin supply that she'd been sharing with volume and specificity since seven AM.
"You're coming," Kurt told me. Not a question.
"I am?"
"You're the only person here who hasn't told me how to fold a napkin today. Get in the car."
Kurt drove a minivan that smelled like crayons and Cheerios — the unmistakable olfactory signature of a vehicle owned by small children and operated by a parent who'd stopped fighting the entropy. Andre's backpack was wedged behind the passenger seat. Charlotte's drawings were taped to the sun visor. Kurt navigated with one hand on the wheel and the other alternating between the radio dial and his phone, which he checked at red lights with the reflexive anxiety of a man monitoring something he couldn't control.
We drove in silence for three blocks. Then Kurt, eyes on the road:
"So what do you actually do?"
The question wasn't hostile. It was Kurt — precise, direct, delivered with the cadence of a man who'd run out of patience for ambiguity.
"I'm between things."
"Between things." Kurt turned left onto the main road. "You showed up to a funeral you weren't invited to. You grill like you've been doing it for twenty years. You know everyone's name, their kids' names, and what kind of earrings Sally wears. And nobody — not one person at that wake — can tell me who you are."
The silence expanded. Kurt let it. He was good at silence — he used it the way Lenny used pauses, as a tool to create pressure that other people rushed to fill.
I could have deflected. A joke, a subject change, a question about the road. The Small Talk skill itched to deploy, offering a dozen smooth transitions that would redirect the conversation without Kurt noticing. But Kurt would notice. Kurt noticed everything. And the skill was a lubricant, not a shield — it made conversations flow, but it couldn't make lies into truth.
"Buzzer meant a lot to me," I said. "I don't have a lot of people left. He was one, and when I found out he died, I needed to be here. That's the whole story."
"That's not the whole story."
"It's the part I can tell you."
Kurt's jaw worked. His hands adjusted on the steering wheel — ten and two, the grip of a man processing information he didn't have enough data to complete. Then he nodded, once, and the nod carried something I hadn't expected: acceptance. Not of the lie. Of the boundary.
"Fair enough." He pulled into the gas station lot. "But if you're running something, I'll figure it out. I always figure it out."
"I believe you."
Kurt put the car in park. Turned off the engine. Sat for a moment with his hands still on the wheel, and the quiet of the parked minivan was intimate in the way all cars are intimate — a small space where the world outside stops mattering.
"Coffee?"
"Yeah. Please."
We walked into the gas station. I bought two coffees with money Kurt handed me because I had none — another detail he filed without comment, adding it to whatever dossier he was building on the stranger who grilled and lied and couldn't pay for a dollar-fifty cup of coffee. We drank in the parking lot, leaning against the minivan, and Kurt checked his bank balance on his phone and flinched in a way he tried to hide by turning toward the gas pumps.
I didn't comment. He didn't explain. Some debts don't need a witness — they just need someone to stand nearby and not make it worse.
We bought the supplies. Drove back. Kurt carried the paper plates inside and I carried the coffee, and the division of labor felt like a contract neither of us had signed but both of us would honor.
The fellowship hall had acquired a new tension in our absence. Roxanne Chase-Feder was standing near the entrance with a glass of water and the posture of a woman who'd been waiting for a specific person to return. Her eyes found me before I'd cleared the doorway.
"Holden, right?"
"That's me."
"I've been meaning to catch you." The smile was flawless — warm, open, the kind of smile that Salma Hayek could deploy like a weapon and that Roxanne Feder had refined over two decades of Hollywood social combat. "I love what you've done with the grill. The guys are really enjoying having you around."
"It's been good. Everyone's been welcoming."
"They are. They're generous that way." She took a sip of water. The sip was tactical — a pause that allowed her eyes to study me over the rim. "You must be catching up on a lot. Three days at a wake — that's commitment for someone who lost touch with Coach years ago."
"He deserved the commitment."
"He did." Another sip. "You know, I've been watching you work the room. You're very good at it. The way you calibrate — a joke for Marcus, a compliment for Sally, a supply run with Kurt. Each person gets exactly what they need to feel comfortable with you."
She's naming my playbook. She's standing here, in a church fellowship hall, dissecting my social strategy with the precision of a talent agent reviewing a pitch.
"I just like people."
"I'm sure you do." Roxanne's smile didn't waver. "I like people too. I also like knowing who they are before I let them near my husband and my children."
The words were delivered at room temperature. No edge, no threat. Just a statement of policy from a woman who'd built a life around recognizing when someone wanted access to Lenny Feder and who was willing to protect that perimeter with the quiet ruthlessness of a mother who'd been lied to by professionals.
"I'm not here for Lenny," I said.
"Good." She touched my arm — brief, warm, the gesture of a woman concluding a conversation she'd won. "Because Lenny is very trusting, and I am not, and one of us is usually right."
She walked away. My arm carried the ghost-impression of her fingertips, and my stomach carried the specific weight of being identified, classified, and filed under watch closely by a woman who was, in every way that mattered, more dangerous than any temporal mission the system could generate.
The cooldown timer blinked: 0:52:33.
Less than an hour. The last retry. The final attempt at a talent show that happened eighteen years ago, in a gymnasium I'd already visited twice, for a kid whose comedy I'd already broken and neutered and needed to set free.
Move one seat tag. Walk away. Trust the kid.
Marcus shuffled past with his plate, demonstrating the moonwalk to Becky Feder, who clapped with the uncritical enthusiasm of a five-year-old.
"See? Heel-toe. Michael got it from me."
"Do it again!"
Marcus did it again. And despite everything — the glitch, the guilt, the fifty hours of consciousness and the burnt thumb and Roxanne's quiet demolition of my cover — watching a grown man perform a terrible moonwalk for a child who believed in it was the funniest thing I'd seen in two lifetimes.
I checked the timer. Fifty minutes. The bathroom was waiting. The past was waiting. And this time, I was going to do the hardest thing I'd attempted since waking up face-down on asphalt in a stranger's body: nothing.
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