Padgett swipes away a little bit, just a little, of crying. “And sit here at the bar with you and the jukebox.”

Martin gestures to the drinks, the drugs, the sticky surface. “This is nothing new. You liked it then.”

“Martin.”

“Is it just money? The reason you—”

“This was yours,” Padgett says again. “Con him out, you said. Marry him, money for everybody. It is so. Much. Money, Martin, but it’s not something you can steal like that, and neither is he.”

“It’s socked away.”

“No, not socked. Money now, in this day and whatever, is the idea of it.”

“No, only rich people say that. I have to purchase the liquids in these bottles with actual, like from my wallet—”

“Not for him,” Padgett says, shaking her head, her whole body, the ring catching the light. “Not when it’s like this. The money is in what he does, they move it from place to place, like a hat trick, and conning him, marrying him for the money, it’s another complicated thing. They’re about to pull a scheme where everybody will have to buy their music, everybody, all over again.”

The jukebox spins a little Leadbelly, as if to say, Not me. The mood breaks from it. Martin and Padgett smile, barely. “On the other hand,” he says, and holds up his other hand. There’s a wrinkled check in it, from the envelope, anachronistic in its typing and some weird texture on the paper of it. Padgett tries to look calmly at it, but the argument is still shaking in her hands, particularly the ring finger, and her heart’s beating with its rapid transit.

“Public transportation,” says Martin Icke, “bought me a shoe.”

“Wow.”

“Long time ago, I know. Not very punctual. It took three letters to BART and a phone call.”

“OK.”

“And you thought I’d never amount to anything,” Martin says, but the drugs, and his sadness, are hindering the deadpan. He just sounds actually unhappy.

“Well, I’m glad.”

“A new shoe,” he says. “A mate for the lonely single one at home.”

“Please stop.”

“Please drink with me,” Martin says. “Stay a little. Do the line.”

She thinks of the sad little parade he wants, children and piñatas. Her heavy hand picks up the glass.

“You drink a lot,” Martin says.

“I do,” she says, drinking a little.

“Well, they say marriage is a civilizing influence.”

“Marriage,” she says, and the barman raises his glass to clink.

“Marriage,” he says.

“But on the other hand, marriage.”

“Yeah,” Martin says. “I hear that too. What are you going to do, Gail Padgett?”

“I don’t know, Vic.”

And the song ends. “Um,” Martin says.

“Martin. There’s lots to decide. He said to think it over, and then there’s lawyers and stuff.”

“To sock the money away.”

“I’d still have,” she says, “money. A very lot of it. There’s just, you know, strings.”