"His pen name is Jo Lazenby and he writes for in-flight magazines," Bullwinkle said nonchalantly from behind the cash register. He was carefully counting the day's change in the palm of his hand as he did, pulling each small denomination loose from the next.

After a moment, he looked up at each of us in turn, surprised that we weren't thoroughly satisfied with this explanation. His squareish head slumped on top of his squareish shoulders, and I knew that he wasn't pulling our leg. 

"That's a fancy lie," Amelia said sweetly, drawing curlicues with her voice. She leaned over the counter and pointed at herself with a coral-coloured nail bedecked with miniature pearls. "He's not paying you, Daddy. Look who is."

Not her usual level. Between the three of us, no one could manifest a complete takedown of the assertion in question. I knew Amelia wouldn't be able to do it, which must be why Jo would say something like that. But I also knew that Amelia could not resist the urge to prove her own cleverness, which must be why she countered anyway.

Bullwinkle shrugged, reaching for the well-worn stack of bills and squaring them like playing cards as he looked back at Amelia, his gaze discomfitingly calm. The clacking of paper against the vinyl countertop nicked the air, once, twice. This was the kind of frivolous make-work designed to make Amelia bristle, to make the burning itch in her pockets spread all the way up the seam of her mini dress. 

She gave me a withering look out of the corner of her eye, as if she couldn't believe men standing up for each other, and we made a tactical withdrawal.

And though it might have been wiser to save the only self-declared fact that we knew about this stranger for a rainy day, I punched my ticket the very next morning. 

"In-flight magazines, huh?" I opened casually, bearing coffee. 

Terrible. It wasn't even clever. 

Jo looked up. Today he was wearing a dark blue batik shirt in his characteristically indecent manner, and I squirmed, feeling like this must be a gross violation of some cultural practice somewhere. 

"Are you going to ask me for the name and home address of my agent?" He asked, visibly grimacing as he did so. Unfortunately, it wasn't an act of sympathetic mirroring. This was all him. 

"...No," I managed, after a brief mental blackout. And unlike almost everything that had passed between my lips in the presence of this man up until this point, I really did mean it.

Had the dream of publication been my particular vice, I would have surely profited from the networks of any member of my immediate family. To employ the obvious pun, that chapter of my life has now irrevocably closed. 

I wanted to explain that I was working the preferred job of aspiring musicians, performers and bespoke craftspersons, not because I thought I had a future somewhere, but simply because I hoped to live long enough and sufficiently apart from the Watch Hill gestalt to have one someday. 

But the moment slipped away as I held my breath - Jo returned his attention to his laptop - and I could only wonder at myself as I walked away, and who would care to know that about me anyway.

"I have a different theory about him," I said to Amelia while playing with my half-emptied ice water, the cup lightly frosting my thumb and forefinger. He was still sitting there, unreachable, really just a few feet away, polishing off the final magazine in today's stack. Evidently put behind his schedule in some profound way by yours truly. 

As I studied him, I found my face effortlessly rearranging into the scowl that he wore.

"And what's that, Honey?"

My head lowered and so did my voice, a little scuffed thing crawling into the collar of my pressed shirt. 

"...Mermaid prince."