The Rideshare Rehearsal

Fadi has been driving since six, and the evening's first fare is the first one to talk to herself. The woman in the back seat, a green scarf pulled up to her chin, is whispering at the window. Then she clears her throat and says, quite loudly, "Dear friend, this is very hard for me."

Fadi glances at the mirror. She does not look up. He understands that he is not being addressed; he is simply the audience.

"I have thought about this for weeks," she goes on. "It's not you, it's me. We want different things. I will always remember the good times." She stops. "No. Too much like a greeting card."

By the second traffic light, she has started again four times. The opening changes. The ending changes. The sentence "I'm not angry, just disappointed" survives every version. Fadi counts it quietly and decides that if he had to grade the speech, he would give it four out of ten. He keeps his eyes on the road and a bag of mints in the door pocket. At the next red light he holds the bag over his shoulder without a word. She takes one.

"Sorry," she says. "I'm practicing. I'm ending something tonight."

"I noticed," Fadi says. "It was hard to miss. May I say one thing? You don't have to answer."

"Go ahead. You've heard all of it by now anyway."

"When my wife and I nearly split up, I wrote a speech too. It was perfect. Every sentence had a lock on it, so she couldn't argue." He signals and turns into a narrow street. "She listened to the whole thing. Then she asked me one question: what do you actually want?"

"What did you say?"

"Nothing. I had no line for that. I had only prepared the part where I was right."

The woman laughs, then stops. She holds up her phone, and the notes screen glows with a long block of text. "Eleven paragraphs. I've been polishing them since Sunday."

"A speech is a good way to avoid a conversation," Fadi says. "But I'm only a driver. What do I know?"

"More than my friends. They all said, 'Just be firm.'" She holds her thumb over the screen, hesitates and deletes the whole note.

"What will you say instead?" he asks.

"That I'm unhappy. That I think he is too. That I want to talk about it properly, and that I'm scared." She says it quickly, as if testing the sentences. "That's all I've got."

"That's nine out of ten," says Fadi.

They stop in front of a narrow house with a lamp in the window. She sits still for a moment, one hand on the door handle. "Could you wait?" she asks. "Ten minutes. If it goes badly, I'd rather not stand alone on the street."

Fadi presses the button on the meter, and the numbers stop. "Take your time," he says, and he turns off the engine.