Alice awoke from her reverie.

“I’ll have a chicken sandwich combo with a vanilla Coke,” she blurted out.

A silence hovered over them like a thick impenetrable fog; the car was dense with tension. Joseph had taken his hands off the wheel and put the car into park ages ago; he was currently sitting with his head in his hands, clearly not out of sadness or anger but what she could only call a state of pure what-the-fuck. The line had backed up into the street.

The speaker crackled: “Go ahead and pull forward.”