“It ate up your shoe? I’ve never heard of that.”

“Neither had anyone at the BART station. Although they said last year a barefoot girl lost a toenail.”

“Well,” Padgett says, “barefoot.”

“Yes, but walking around with one sock’s not better. I don’t have a lot of shoes and these, this one, is, are, probably my favorites. They better pay.”

“Yeah,” Padgett says, and then neither of them says what is obvious to know, which is that Bay Area Rapid Transit is not going to buy Martin Icke a shoe. The only job he’s ever had that wasn’t bartending was an office job, do-goody, and three weeks in, the boss told him to take a box of crucial files outside and lock it in her car, which she had left unlocked a block away. Turns out there were two cars unlocked on that block, both ratty and a little hip such as might be owned by his boss. Martin didn’t know make, didn’t know model. It could happen to anyone, maybe, but it didn’t. It happened to Martin, and now Martin is happening to her.

They are still, since that wedding, together, and that’s weird. Isn’t it? The night they rolled out the barrel, they’d ended up first at another bar, a dingy place with one TV for news and the other one for football, and poured everyone a shot of the Happy Couple. They had more drinks, a strategy they keep employing. They left the barrel behind and took to the sidewalks, very late and still dirty from scuffing around the grove. They kept each other from stumbling because they were both stumbling, so by all appearances stumbling was just a way to walk. They didn’t kiss until a red light and a busy street forced them to lean against a sign announcing that the bus no longer stopped there. “I want to fuck you,” he said against her mouth, “so badly,” and that night he did, very badly, and until daylight they listened to records and smoked and, Padgett tries to think, no, that’s it. His apartment was not filthy but it was small, with shelves of strange liquors bird-dogged by friends on far-flung retreats, and some angry books about what was wrong, politically mostly, with everything. He didn’t have room for a dog, or even a cat, or a space where she could keep more than a handful of clothes. The only thing he had room for was improvement. She had learned that if you were seventy-five cents short for cigarettes and yogurt at the corner store, or six dollars, he would likely leave you hanging, spacing out at the beef jerky with his hands in his dusty pockets.