Jack had gotten his cigarette going; I could smell the fragrant-acrid smoke from behind me. I turned back to him and was just about to say, I’ll call you sometime this week, when he spoke first. “Hailey?”

“What?”

“When you say you’re going to get something to eat later, you mean later this morning, right? Not late this afternoon?”

“Yeah,” I said, baffled. “Why?”

“We had a lot to drink last night, but I didn’t see you eat anything. You’re getting thin.”

“Jack, my job burns, like, eight thousand calories an hour. I couldn’t do it if I wasn’t eating enough,” I pointed out.

He was not appeased. I said, “Something else on your mind?”

He said, “You treat yourself with a certain amount of disregard, Hailey. I’ve known you for six months, and how often in that time have you been injured on the job? First those stitches in your eyebrow, then that thing with your wrist-”

“That was an old break. The bone was weak,” I argued. “Look, I’m a bike messenger. I’ve been the top-earning rider for my service nearly every month since I hired on. I couldn’t do that without taking some risks. There’s a lot of competition.”

Jack closed his eyes briefly, then said, “You don’t want to be the most reckless bike messenger in San Francisco, Hailey. That’s like being the town drunk in New Orleans.”

“I didn’t know you cared.”

“You ever think about school?”

“I thought I mentioned that before,” I said. “I did a little school back east. It didn’t work out.”

“And you can never go back?”

“What’s with you today?” I asked him. “The thing I like most about you is that you’re free of all the middle-class rhetoric, and now suddenly you’re doing a guidance-counselor thing.”

Jack sighed. “I’m not trying to make you angry.”

“I’m not,” I said, relenting.