"It's not a good couch," Nicky said again, apologetically.
"You told me."
"I wanted you to have reasonable expectations."
Theda sat on the couch. It sighed under her with a long, sorrowful whoosh of air, and somewhere deep in its interior a spring twanged like a banjo string. She took off her remaining shoe, since there was no point in it anymore, and pulled her wet stockinged feet up under her, and looked around the room.
Nicky went to the coffee machine and fed it quarters and got two cups, and came back holding them out in front of him like candles, and handed her one. It was hot and thin and tasted of the paper cup, and it was the best coffee she had ever had.
"I'll pay you back," she said.
"Sure, sure."
"I mean it. I'm keeping track. One dollar bus fare, and thirty-five cents coffee."
"Forty."
"Forty cents coffee." She looked at him over the rim of the cup. "You always say that. Sure, sure. Even when you don't mean it."
"I mean it. I mean sure."
"You mean you don't want to argue."
He thought about this, his face going still. Then he nodded, as if she'd told him the time.
"Yeah," he said. "That's probably true."
He crouched in front of the cart and pressed a button on the VCR, and the whole top of it rose up on a hinge with a heavy mechanical clunk, like the mouth of a large tame animal. He slid the tape out of its black case, looked at the label, slid it carefully into the slot, and pressed the lid back down. The machine whirred and clicked and swallowed. The Zenith hummed, warmed, and blossomed into a field of electric blue.