“I know what we’re in.”

“Money isn’t like that now, if it ever was, a pile of rubies or gold from a galleon. We aren’t pirates. This money is foxed away, it’s pretend money, it’s the idea of money, the profit made from betting that some other pile of money wouldn’t get doubled from betting on some other pile. You want a lamp? He has a lamp we could resell someplace for a month’s rent, if you’re ready to have the getaway car idling outside with a big trunk in back for stolen lamps.”

“I do not want a lamp.” His hands are sloppy on the bottle and she looks and sees his eyes shimmering, as if in reply to the jukebox. He’s crying? Or, yes, the room has just collapsed a little; it often does at this time of drink.

“What do you want,” she says, quietly, not really asking a question, and puts a hand on the back of his neck. Martin leans in so her arm is tricked around him and she watches him smile at the luck and the pressure of it.

“A parade.”

My friends stay up way too late.

“What?”

“I don’t,” he says, miserably, “have the education for the moneygrubbing, but my dad used to water down bourbon and let me watch them play poker, a bunch of old men talking.”

“Your dad was a gambler? Professionally?”

“He never did anything professionally. So I’m trying to figure it out, Padgett.” His arm takes a slow sweep around the bar. “The only recognition I need is for someone to signal for a refill. But if I don’t learn the know-how to get better at this, I’ll get tossed to Portland, Oregon.”

“Heaven forbid,” Padgett says.

“Well, I see you don’t live there either. In this city everyone’s scheming for a monument, I get that, and I’ve got to latch on to some location, some tiny little plot I can hatch while they skyscraper up everything. I picture it like a parade, you know? Just a little happy march in my honor. Flowers tumbling down from the windows. Piñatas, kids with confetti, dogs barking in the streets, a parade is my vision, and don’t look at me like it’s ridiculous stupid because I know it is.”