He did not say anything. He looked at her for a long moment across the wet wooden circle. Then he went to the end of the car and put his shoulder against it, and Manny, on the other end, looked from him to her and back and rolled his eyes up to heaven, and Mina set down her purse on the bricks and went and put her shoulder against the car beside Remy's, and pushed.
It was heavier than she had imagined, six tons of wood and iron, and then it moved, slowly, gracefully, like something in a music box, and the two of them walked it around in a half circle under the fog until it faced the hill.
"You're not supposed to do that," he said. They were the first words. They were, she thought, absolutely perfect. "Passengers don't push."
"I'm not a passenger yet."
"No," he said. "You're bothering my turntable."
He climbed up onto the car and took hold of the lever and looked down at her, and she saw that the paperback was sticking out of the pocket of his Muni jacket, the gray suggestion of a whale, with no bookmark in it at all.
"You finished it," she said.
"Last night. Couldn't sleep. Read the last hundred and thirty pages in one go, sitting on my aunt's back steps in a blanket. I've never broken a promise so fast in my life."
"How does it end?"
"Badly," said Remy. "Everybody drowns. The whale wins. The whole ship goes down." He held out his hand. "Except one guy. The one who's been telling the story the whole time. He floats up on a coffin and gets picked up the next day. You know why? Because somebody's got to say what happened. That's the only reason he makes it. He's the one who talks."
She looked at his hand, the hard dry calloused hand, with the comma on the back of it.