"Nicky DeLuca," he said. "What are you doing here? Your shift ended at four. Did somebody die?"
"No one died, Cos. I need the break room. Just the TV. A couple of hours."
"For what?"
Nicky held up the tape. Cosmo squinted at it. Then he put on a pair of reading glasses, which made his nose look even larger, like a ship's figurehead with spectacles, and squinted at it again.
"It Happened One Night," he said slowly. He took the glasses off and looked at Theda with an entirely new expression, a kind of delighted horror. "Nicky. Nicky. You brought a girl to the garage to watch It Happened One Night?"
"It's not like that."
"I saw this picture at the Majestic. 1934. I was seventeen. I took Angie Medeiros in her sister's coat. I bought her a box of nonpareils. She married a guy who sold Studebakers." He looked misty for a moment, then hard. "This is very irregular."
"I know it."
"That TV is property of the Rhode Island Public Transit Authority."
"I know."
"It's for safety films."
"It's a safety emergency, Cos. Carmela's going to kill me."
Cosmo considered. He picked up the grinder, took a large bite, and chewed it thoughtfully while the radios crackled around him.
"Okay," he said at last. "On three conditions. One. Nobody tells the superintendent. Two. If it gets busy, I'm going to have to holler, and you holler back. And three." He wiped his fingers on the wax paper with great dignity. "I get to come in and watch the hitchhiking."
The break room was down a short hallway, behind a door with a sign on it that said DRIVERS ONLY — THIS MEANS YOU. It was a long, low room with linoleum tiles that had once been green, a row of lockers along one wall, a Coca-Cola machine, a coffee machine, three Formica tables, a calendar from a tire company that was still on August, and, at the far end, facing a big wood-grain Zenith on a steel cart, a brown Naugahyde couch that had been mended with electrical tape in so many places it looked like it had been in a knife fight.