But he is kind, or kind of kind. He cannot walk by the paltriest lemonade stand without treating the flushed proprietor like a professional, buying two cupfuls he then improves with flask whiskey when he rounds the corner with Padgett. The drinks are delicious. They have them until late, and then hit dawn with cheerful regret for a greasy breakfast. It is hard for Padgett to figure out precisely or even partially what she is doing here, on a stool that’s now basically designated hers, watching him, one-footed and frowning at a sip of coffee and slicing limes. The sex is still mostly out of the way, relegated beneath the strong drinks and the short, pausey conversations. Their occasional lusty bouts of romanticism are like a car alarm in the neighborhood, just sometimes piping up. Mostly they just lounge around, he in the same tie he hasn’t untied for days, just loosened and hung on a nail, and her doing whatever it is she’s doing at the bar. She recognizes the look she keeps catching him giving her, romantic would be the word, a little feverish from a bug he’s caught worse than she has. He has big plans that probably won’t pan out. She has no plans and that will likely work out just that way. Oh, she doesn’t know. Martin puts a drink in front of her.

“Sip it,” he says. “Charging eleven dollars each.”

“Seems steep.”

“Yeah, but we make the ginger ale.”

“How does one,” she says, “make ginger ale?”

“Sugar mostly,” Martin says. “Story of the world.” He keeps looking at her, the way he looks at the building she lives in. Padgett, over and over, shoos him away from even a few questions about her family, but once, after downing Old-Fashioneds from every spot on Divisadero, she was so goopy she didn’t notice he sat next to her in the backseat as a phone-fetched car dropped her off in a comfortable, view-soaked neighborhood where absolutely nobody he knows lives. Or will ever live. Padgett has her own place, but just technically; her own entrance in her mother’s crumbly—well, it’s a mansion, its ugliness does not disqualify it from that tag. He was right the first time: she’s rich. A rich dame. The Bottle family, who donated the grove he snitched for the name of the bar. Since then, he has the feeling, not that they fit together, but that something, some task, could be done with them both in tandem, whisk and muffin tin, paint can and mortgage, shovel and terrified witness.

“It’s good,” she tells him, re the drink.

“Good for a boys’ night out?”

“Oh yeah, your speakeasy party tonight.”

He makes a gesture like she won a stuffed animal. “You should stick around.”

“I’m not invited.”

“I just did. You’re the barman’s girl.”