"I need to get to Brooklyn," she said, naming a street near Carter's Corner. "Can you take me there?" He checked the address on his screen, nodded, and unlocked the door. "Of course. Get in before you catch a cold," he said, waiting until she settled into the back seat before pulling into traffic.
She placed her damp bag against her knees and caught his eyes in the mirror. "And please don't ask me how my day was." The driver raised one eyebrow, acknowledging a boundary without taking offense. "I wasn't going to," he said. "Good," Emma muttered, leaning her forehead against the cool glass.
"I was going to ask whether you'd prefer the quiet route or the faster route," he added. Outside, a delivery cyclist argued with a van driver beneath a traffic light, and the entire street seemed to have chosen noise as its native language. Emma allowed herself the smallest smile of the day. "The quiet route, please."
The driver turned onto a narrower avenue where rain darkened the brick facades and the storefronts still belonged to family businesses with hand-painted signs. He did not turn up the radio, ask whether she was visiting someone, or try to fill the silence with opinions about weather or politics. Emma watched a father lift a child over a puddle and felt unexpectedly jealous of how simple the gesture looked. She had become so accustomed to carrying everyone else's anxiety that the sight of someone being carried, even for a moment, hurt.
At the next light the driver said, "You got it," as though they had just reached a decision of great professional importance. Two blocks later he glanced at the mirror and ventured, "Long day?" Emma lifted her head.
"I specifically asked you not to ask me that." He nodded immediately. "You're right. My mistake."
She expected another question, an explanation, or the defensiveness people often displayed when asked to leave her alone. None came. The taxi rolled past a flower shop whose owner was rescuing buckets of sunflowers from the rain, and Emma realized she had been waiting for the driver to make her feel guilty for being abrupt. Instead he had simply respected her.
"I lost a job I really needed," she said after another minute. He looked at her in the mirror without turning his head. "I'm sorry." Emma almost laughed at the simplicity of it. "Sometimes people say things because they don't know what else to offer," she told him, and he considered that in silence.
"And what do you offer?" she asked, partly because she was curious and partly because she wanted to see whether he would deliver the same bright promise everyone had given her for the past three months. "A ride," he answered. "A reasonably clean taxi. Terrible coffee if you ask me to stop somewhere." His mouth turned slightly upward, but he did not ask her to pretend the joke fixed anything.
"You're not very good at cheering people up," Emma said. "I'm better at listening." It was such an ordinary answer that she believed it, although she could not have explained why. She looked down at the creased folder of application materials resting on her lap, its carefully printed references protected in a plastic sleeve that now seemed absurdly hopeful.