Chapter 68: McLaren's
The record player was doing something Andrew hadn't expected from a bar on a Thursday night.
"Those were such happy times and not so long ago..."
The Carpenters. "Yesterday Once More." Coming from actual vinyl, not a jukebox — he could hear the slight warmth of it, the surface texture that streaming would eventually make people nostalgic for without knowing why. He stood in the doorway for a moment longer than necessary, letting his eyes adjust and his ears confirm what they were hearing, and then he went in.
McLaren's was smaller than the old bar on Bedford — tighter layout, booths along both walls, the bar itself running the length of the back wall with a mirror behind the bottles that doubled the apparent depth of the room. No pool table. No stage, which meant no house musician slot, which was fine because that wasn't why he was here. The lighting was the warm amber that good bars understood instinctively and bad bars tried to manufacture.
Two or three booths occupied. A couple at the far end. A group of three near the door that had the energy of people still deciding how the evening was going to go.
No cigarette smell, which he registered with quiet gratitude. The old bar had been tolerable. This was better.
He settled onto a stool at the bar.
"Club soda with lime," he said.
The bartender — mid-forties, the comfortable unhurry of someone who'd been doing this long enough that nothing surprised him — built it without commentary and set it down. Andrew left a decent tip for the simplicity of the transaction and took his drink to one of the small round tables near the bar. Not a booth — booths were for two people or groups, and sitting alone in one had a specific quality he wasn't interested in projecting tonight. The round table was better. Smaller, slightly removed from the main flow, the kind of position that let you be in a room without being available to it.
He'd been thinking about the food truck on the walk over. Four months in, and the operation had found its rhythm — the Tuesday-through-Saturday schedule, the Columbus Avenue spot, the regulars who showed up at the same time every week with the reliable punctuality of people who had organized a small portion of their lives around something they trusted. Daisy Kaplan and her friends on Thursdays. The construction crew from the building going up on 78th who came every day and ate standing up and were gone in twelve minutes. The woman from the publishing house on 80th who always ordered the same thing and had stopped looking at the menu.
The cooking skill was moving, but slowly — the Expert level had a different texture than Proficient had. At Proficient, improvement had been measurable week to week. At Expert, the increments were smaller and the gaps between them longer, and what moved the number wasn't volume of cooking but the quality of attention he brought to specific problems. A new technique, applied correctly, for the first time. A dish rebuilt from the base up rather than executed from memory. Those moved it. Repetition, no matter how perfect, mostly didn't.
He'd need to start thinking about what was next. Not a restaurant — he'd settled that question. But the truck had a ceiling, and he could see the ceiling from where he was standing.
"...how I wondered where they'd gone..."
He took a sip of his club soda and let himself just be in the room for a while.
The couple in the booth next to his had been doing fine until they weren't.
Andrew heard the shift before he consciously tracked it — the volume dropping, then climbing, then dropping again in the specific rhythm of a conversation that had left its rails. He wasn't paying attention to the content, just the shape of it. Then the man's voice went up in a way that pulled the whole bar's ambient attention sideways.
"Jean, are you really going back to England?"
Andrew looked over without meaning to.
The woman — Jean — was standing now, and her posture had the quality of someone who had been sitting with a decision for a long time and had finally stood up inside it. She was in her late twenties, composed in the specific way of someone managing strong feelings through good manners, and her accent when she spoke was clearly British — not affected, just real, the kind that didn't soften for American rooms.
"Remy," she said, quietly and clearly, "I don't think I have a reason to stay."
"Then what about me?" The man — Remy — was on his feet now too. "Am I not enough of a reason?"
"I think we both need to calm down."
"Who else is there?" Remy's voice had crossed into the register that made nearby tables go still. "Is there someone back there? Is that why you're so ready to leave?"
"You're not being reasonable."
"Who is it?" He grabbed her wrist.
Jean's face changed — not fear, something colder. "You're hurting me."
Andrew was already standing.
He didn't make a production of it. He set his glass down, crossed the four feet between them, and put a hand on Remy's shoulder with enough pressure to communicate that the grip on Jean's wrist was going to stop now.
"Hey." He kept his voice level. "Let go of her arm."
Remy looked at him with the specific fury of a man who had been building toward something and was now being interrupted by someone he didn't know. His eyes moved over Andrew with the quick assessment of someone deciding whether this was a fight or not.
Andrew held his gaze and said nothing further. The assessment ran.
Remy let go of Jean's wrist.
Before anything else could develop, a young man in a staff polo appeared from somewhere behind the bar — seventeen or eighteen, six-one at least, with the build of someone who'd been athletic since before he had a choice about it and the expression of someone who had done this particular job before. He stepped in smoothly, put himself between Remy and the room, and said, with a professionalism that was slightly at odds with his age: "Sir, I'm going to need you to come with me."
Not a request. The kind of phrasing that left the other person technically with options while making clear that only one of them was real.
Remy went. The young man walked him toward the back hallway with the practiced ease of someone who'd made this trip before.
The bartender, who had been watching all of this from behind the bar with the expression of a man who had seen this specific situation in various configurations many times, resumed wiping glasses.
"Sorry about that," he said, to the room generally. The room resumed.
Jean was standing at the table with her hand around her own wrist, not quite rubbing it, just holding it. She looked at Andrew.
"Thank you," she said.
"You okay?"
"Yes." She said it with the clipped precision of someone for whom yes meant I'm handling it, please don't make more of this than it is. "I'm sorry you were pulled into that."
"I wasn't pulled in," Andrew said. "I walked over."
Something in her expression shifted — the slightly formal composure making room for something more direct. "Even so."
He gestured at the table. "You were sitting there."
"My seat appears to have been taken while Remy was being escorted out." She looked around the bar. The booths were full. "It happens quickly."
Andrew looked at his round table — two chairs, both empty.
"Sit down if you want," he said.
Jean looked at him, then at the table, then made the calculation and sat. She flagged the bartender and ordered two drinks without asking Andrew what he wanted, then looked at him with a slightly raised eyebrow when the glasses arrived.
"I don't drink," he said.
"I noticed, from before." She picked up her own glass. "The other one is mine. I ordered two because I felt I'd earned it."
He almost smiled. "Fair."
She drank the first one with the composed efficiency of someone drinking for functional rather than social purposes. Set the glass down. Looked at the second one.
"Are you going back?" he asked. "To England."
She looked at him. "That's direct."
"You don't have to answer."
A pause. The record player had moved on to something else — a slower song, something from the early seventies that he couldn't immediately place.
"Yes," Jean said. "I've been here four years. My visa situation is becoming complicated, and—" She stopped. "Remy thought we had more time than we did. I suppose I let him think that."
Andrew nodded. He understood the shape of it without needing the details. Someone who'd been in a place with an end date that kept getting extended until both people had stopped tracking it, and then it arrived anyway.
"Where in England?" he said.
"Oxford, originally. I'm at Columbia now — finishing a doctorate." She said it without emphasis, the way people mentioned things that were simply true about them.
"What field?"
"History. Specifically early modern England. Sixteenth century." She looked at him. "You're not going to make the obvious comment."
"Which one?"
"That it must be convenient, going home to do research on England."
Andrew picked up his club soda. "I wasn't thinking that."
"Most people do." She seemed slightly surprised. Not unpleasantly.
They talked for a while — about the city, about the specific experience of living somewhere temporarily long enough that leaving it was its own kind of loss, about the difference between a place you chose and a place that chose you. Jean was precise with language in a way that Andrew found genuinely interesting — she said what she meant and expected you to track it, which he could.
Remy did not reappear. Andrew assumed the young staffer had escorted him to a cab or at least to the sidewalk with sufficient clarity about not returning.
At some point Jean looked at the second drink she hadn't touched and pushed it a few inches toward Andrew.
"You're sure you don't want it?"
"Completely."
"A man who doesn't drink in a bar," she said, studying him with the faint analytical attention of someone who spent their professional life reconstructing things from evidence. "And ordered a club soda without any apparent self-consciousness about it."
"It's just a preference."
"Most people feel the need to explain a preference like that. You didn't."
"It doesn't require explaining."
She looked at him for a moment. "No," she said, apparently deciding something. "I suppose it doesn't."
The record player cycled back to something with strings. The bar had settled into its later-evening rhythm — the group near the door had gone, replaced by a couple who looked like they were having a first date and were doing adequately. The bartender was deep in conversation with someone at the far end of the counter.
"Are you here often?" Jean asked.
"First time," Andrew said. "I used to play at a bar nearby. It closed."
"You're a musician?"
"Among other things."
She seemed to decide this was satisfactory and not push it.
He thought about Christie at Hartwell, probably in her dormitory right now doing something productive because that was what Christie did when she was nervous. About Ross, who was going to get news tomorrow that would restart a clock he'd thought had finally stopped. About the Boxing problem, which was still the Boxing problem.
About the truck on Monday, and Daisy Kaplan who'd eat the risotto again and probably bring her friends.
"I should go," Jean said, not as if she wanted to but as a statement about the hour.
Andrew looked at his watch. Nearly ten-thirty.
"I'll walk you out," he said.
They left together into the March night, which had the particular quality of a city trying to remember what warmth felt like. Jean buttoned her coat efficiently and looked at the street.
"Thank you again," she said. "For the table, and the— intervention, earlier."
"Don't thank me for the table. You were out of options."
The almost-smile again. She had a good face for it — the kind that suggested the smile was more available than she typically deployed it.
She held out her hand. "Jean Holloway."
Andrew shook it.
Holloway.
He kept his expression neutral through an act of genuine attention.
"Andrew Sanchez," he said.
She nodded once — crisp, the handshake of someone who meant it — and turned toward the avenue to find a cab.
Andrew stood on the sidewalk and watched her go, and turned the name over twice before putting it away.
Holloway. His other-life name. The one that belonged to the person he'd been before he'd been Andrew Sanchez in this world.
New York was full of coincidences. He knew that. He'd stopped treating them all as meaningful.
But he filed it anyway, the way he filed things that he couldn't immediately explain and didn't want to lose.
He put his hands in his pockets and walked home.
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