Across town from anything interesting, nearing midnight, Lillian Padgett Bottle, mother of Gail Padgett Bottle and member in good standing of the board of directors of Bottle Grove, orders a refill of decaffeinated coffee. Padgett twists her napkin in her lap like a soft cotton noose. Her mother can make a dinner as long as a toothache if the impulse strikes her, or if there’s a plan. Padgett does not know what it is. Even in a very ambitious restaurant like this one, midnight on a Sunday in San Francisco might as well be four in the morning. The staff hates them both, and so does Padgett.

“I know you’ve heard all this, and I know you’re tired of it,” Lil says. Padgett has narrowed her eyes to the width of the last of the bottle of the wine they had with their torch-seared urchin and their skittery greens with radish and their whatever it was Padgett had—chicken, was it, something from a farm. It is a bottle, right in front of her, that she has promised herself not to finish, to ward off her mother’s clucky glares. Since the afternoon with Martin and all the whiskey, sobriety has been a more difficult wagon, lunky and splintery, no fun to climb back on. The world, it is plotting to give her incidents and attitude that are violently, desperately thirst-inducing, and the desire for another round, one more glass, is a woodpecker’s tap-taps on her sore skull. It wouldn’t be good, she knows. She knows something about wine, and that last half glass is too warm to be good. It’s too far gone, but she wants to get that far gone too, to catch up.

“You are a wife, Padgett.”

Padgett can recite this story more easily than her times tables. A lot more easily, actually. Lil clatters her coffee cup down and mother and daughter, widow and wife, say it in unison as if comradely: “The wife of a prominent man.”

The waitstaff, in the corner where the espresso machine squats like a Buddha, reacts in Padgett’s peripheral vision: We’re never going home. “Do you know how prominent, Padgett? I don’t think you do.” She lays one hand over her other one and for a second Padgett has the faint hope her mother will wiggle them and pretend there’s a turtle on the table. “One syllable,” Lil gasps or whispers, “is how he is known. Do you know this? They call him the Vic, one syllable.”

“Two.”

“Don’t change the subject. I mean, do you, playing mother to that little girl—”

“Don’t,” Padgett says, but manages to just grab the water instead of Lil, “look at me like that.”

“It’s a look of, I was thinking, does she, my only daughter, know what she’s doing?”

“Did you do this to my brother, too?”

“Don’t say did. Matty’s not dead.”