Shandy looks genuinely startled, blurts, “You’re lying. Why would she care a shit about you?”

“We got a history. She wants me to go to work for her. I’ve been thinking about it, maybe would have accepted right away, but that would mean moving to New York and leaving you, babe.” He puts his arm around her.

She pulls away. “Well, looks like her show’s on its way to being a comedy.”

“Put our guest over there on my tab,” Marino says with loud largesse, nodding and pointing at the man in the flame do-rag sitting next to his dog at the bar. “He’s having a rough night. Got five lousy bucks to his name.”

The man turns around and Marino gets a good look at a face pitted with acne scars. He has the snake eyes that Marino associates with people who have done time.

“I can pay for my own damn beer,” the man in the flame do-rag says.

Shandy continues complaining to Jess, not bothering to look at her face, so she may as well be talking to herself.

“Don’t appear to me like you can pay for much of anything, and I apologize for my southern hospitality,” Marino says, loud enough for everyone in the bar to hear.

“I don’t think you should go anywhere.” Jess looks at Marino, at his drink.

“There’s room for only one woman in his life, and one of these days he’s gonna figure that out,” Shandy says to Jess and anybody else listening. “Without me, what’s he got, anyway? Who do you think gave him that fancy necklace he’s wearing?”

“Fuck you,” the man in the do-rag says to Marino. “Fuck your mother.”

Jess walks over to the bar, crosses her arms. She says to the man in the do-rag, “We talk polite in here. I think you better leave.”

“What?” he says loudly, cupping a hand behind his ear, mocking her.

Marino’s chair scrapes back and in three long strides he is between them. “You say you’re sorry, asshole,” Marino says to him.

The man’s eyes touch his like needles. He crumples the five-dollar bill he got out of the ATM, drops it on the floor, crushes it beneath his boot as if he’s putting out a cigarette. He smacks the dog’s butt, heads to the door as he says to Marino, “Why don’t you come out here like a man? I got something to say to you.”

Marino follows him and his dog across the dirt parking lot to an old chopper, probably put together in the seventies, a four-speed with a kick start, flame paint job, something funny-looking about the license tag.

“Cardboard,” Marino realizes out loud. “Homemade. Now, ain’t that sweet. Tell me what you got to say.”