“It’s a party,” Martin says, more or less patiently, “for this new music system. The Vic is relaunching it, or reworking it, or anyway, it’s happening, or trying to happen again. So he asked me, through an underling with a very large party budget, to hook up the Vic’s system for the Vic’s party. This is sort of what I mean.”

“Your meaning,” Padgett said, “is now determined by some mogul’s—”

“Stop it. It’s music for a party. I am hoping, yes, to make a success of the speakeasy. The Vic having a party here is huge.”

“The Vic, the Vic, the Vic.” This is a rallying cry lately in San Francisco, of people tired of the mogul, of all the moguls, although it is a rallying cry made weaker by Padgett saying it while tipping her glass down to her mouth, ice cubes smacking her nose.

Martin leans over the bar and removes the glass from her premises. “That’s two already,” he says. “Slow down. Slow down and stay.”

“Why,” Padgett says, “should I?”

His eyes get bright, or maybe, Padgett thinks, he’s always, maybe, brighter than she thinks. He can’t say, or doesn’t know how to, that he’s falling harder and harder for Gail Padgett Bottle, so he just says, “I have plans.”

Padgett is back on her stool, twirling around. The stool does not actually twirl, so she has to do it herself. “I don’t,” she admits. “I have no plans for the evening or anything.”

“Invite a friend to join in. There will be a lot of booze and wealth.”

“My friends are kind of in a holding pattern,” she says, and stops twirling so she is facing the wall. A poster makes her miss, miss, miss her brother. The barman leans farther over to take her shoulders and move her to face him. It’s a bulky maneuver, like lifting a rocking chair.

“I have plans,” he says again, and Padgett guesses she would say his eyes are twinkly. Her own eyes want to cry just looking at him. She closes them instead and kisses him, first just for something to do and then, like it is with the two of them, lengthily.

“Stop messing around,” Stanford says cheerily in the doorway. “You have time to lean, you have time to clean.”

“If you have time to think,” Padgett says, “you have time to drink.”

Martin tosses Stanford a towel. “You have time to duck—”

Padgett laughs. Stanford pats her shoulder hello. “Where are we on being ready?”

“Almost,” Martin says, his fingers dialing on the device. A gravelly man says soothingly, over strings and drums, that this song goes out to all those who have seen trouble. Padgett thinks that’s nice of him, to dedicate the tune to her like that.

“Enough ginger ale?”

“Plenty,” Martin says, the list out of his pocket. “Limes done. Downstairs basically set.”