She spits out an address and gets slammed against the door when he turns sudden and rough, good. The night air looks bruised too, and out the window down a long street the streetlights all synch to red. When she was a kid, her mother said the lights were timed, and somehow she thought they sensed when the Padgett family were in a hurry and when they had time to stop. She was wrong about every speck of anything. The cab shakes through the city. They’re putting up condos where five years ago Padgett would not have spat on the ground. “Hurry,” she tells him.

“Ma’am,” says the guy her own goddamn age, “I’m not in your hurry.”

“You are,” she says. “You’re at the helm of it, and you know—” She bites it off, the phrase like cold scrambled eggs in her mouth, who my husband is? Her voice sounds like her mother’s, so terrible, Have a baby, in this cab moving slow as a goddamn earthworm.

Martin is working his mortar and pestle when she hustles into the place. It’s empty almost; the bar is dying out. Padgett crosses over and steadies herself on a barstool, a centuries-old terrible standby strategy, and nearly shoves against the woman at what was once her usual spot. Padgett is not drunk, she isn’t. She is just there, staggering. Padgett knows she’s been like this for years.

“Padgett,” the barman says, with a quick glance at the other woman.

“Yes,” she tells him.

Martin pours tonic, not calmly. “Yes,” he says, “it’s you? Or yes to the thing we were talking about, you know, the thing before?”

Padgett says nothing. She takes a stool and so does her purse. Her phone is in it; if the Vic checks she’ll say, what will she say, you know Lil. Lil was on a tear. Bottle Grove, she insisted. The other woman, the only other customer, takes her drink and moves away, clutching a paper bag like she’s guarding a puppy inside. Padgett watches it go, and her gaze slides up the woman’s face until she thinks, yes, she recognizes her.

“Well?” Martin asks.

“Rachel,” Padgett says. “Isn’t it?”

Rachel, another mom at the Kitsune Preschool, turns around slowly, with a tight vacant face like she’s a mummy.

“Padgett,” Padgett says.

“Oh yes,” Rachel says faintly.

“We know each other from school,” Padgett explains pointedly to the barman.

“It’s nice,” Rachel says. “To. See you.” She sounds like a hostage reading cue cards.

“You OK?” Padgett asks. “Bad night?”

The mom steps back away with her crinkly bag.

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” Padgett says, looking rabbit-panicky at Martin. “We can’t talk with her here,” she whispers.

“We wouldn’t have had to,” the barman says, and shrugs at her. “You promised you’d call me this week at the latest.”