The quilted coat woman

The woman in the quilted coat. I keep thinking about her. Not in a weird way — in the way where I am trying to figure out if she was real or if I invented her in the thirty seconds after the Greggs line landed and I needed someone to have laughed at it. She dropped her shoulders. I saw it. A full physical reaction, like the joke had something in her neck. Nobody does that on purpose. That is not a performed laugh. That is a person who forgot they were standing in a bar in Highgate on a Friday night listening to a man from Manchester talk about a pastry shop.

I want to ask her if it was real.

I will never ask her. That is not the kind of thing you ask. That is the kind of thing you carry.

The Stretford line stayed. I read it twice and then I made myself stop because reading something three times is when it starts to sound wrong and I cannot afford for that line to sound wrong. It is about Dad and it is about the kitchen table and it is about the two years after he left when I still thought leaving was just arriving with worse timing. I wrote it and it was true and I did not cross it out and my hands were shaking while I closed the Moleskine.

That is not a bit.