If you want rage at its ragiest, tell a woman to have a child. Padgett stands up and lets her fury escape. Now it’s everyone’s problem. She looks around the empty place with the swivel of a tank, but it is only her mother in her sights.

“Gail. You’re acting like—”

“You make me act like,” Padgett sputters, “a monster, and the monster is you.”

It’s not, she can hear it herself, a good exit line, and neither is it a good exit. She’s not drunk, because she’s been careful, and so she has none of the bravado, the shiny self-image, that four pre-dinner drinks might have provided her. She’s just thirsty, and she rages out thirstily, with her phone in hand already scanning for getaway cars. “We have an account, right?” she is yelling to the hostess at the door. “When we set up the reservation? Charge it there with a forty percent tip and escort the lady at my table off the roof of a skyscraper.”

“You have to sign off on that,” the woman deadpans, but then Padgett sees she is not, no she isn’t, comrades-in-arms with her. She has the bill all set in a little leather thingy rectangle.

“Forty percent,” Padgett insists, and hears herself, a snarling privileged woman getting a look of such truculent, such sneering superiority that Padgett misses her, misses all miserable servers, misses her own scornful life just a small handful of years ago, when she was just exactly this frowning exhausted employee with red zappy eyes probably full of cocaine, oh how she misses it, like a childhood dead dog, 100 percent.

But she’s out. The night’s all thick and starless, the neighborhood so quiet it looks carpet-bombed, the mannequins in boutique windows frozen up in morgue poses. Nothing, says the phone. Midnight on Sunday is too late, milady, but then there’s an honest-to-goodness taxi, old-fashioned yellow, spurned in the world of clean smooth black professional vehicles her phone can summon in minutes. She stands in the middle of the street, feeling like a hooker, and flags it down with both hands, one clutching her phone and the other, there it is, holding the restaurant’s napkin, which she drops into the gutter like a white flag.

“This isn’t one of our hired competitors,” the driver says smugly when she climbs in, and the music is too hip, too. “You have to tell me like a person where you want to go.”