“It was not symbolic,” the Vic says, as if the word were genocide. “I wanted to see what he would do, call maintenance, stand on the desk to try to fix the problem.”

“And—?”

“And at the end of five weeks I had to sign for a registered package. Every screw in the bag, with a note saying, I believe you dropped these.”

Padgett takes her hand out. “How did he—?”

“No grease on them, maybe. They did look brand-new. I don’t know, though, we never talked about it.”

“Never?”

“It was never mentioned and he’s still with us. Great guy.”

A smoke ring fades into the dusk, a touch more pollution on the city lights. “Great guy? Is the word you would use—?”

“It’s a story,” the Vic says, and—

—Padgett has had five vodka tonics at the reception they breezed through. Now the bed is tilting houseboatily, but she’s trying to listen.

“I was sixteen and she was twenty-three. Her dad was a market guy, I was interning or whatever you’d call getting coffee and yelled at.”

Padgett knows market doesn’t mean piles of grapes and onions, even though that’s what she always pictures.

“Around the office they said she was engaged, straight out of Yale. She was odd and quiet but very smart, we rolled our eyes together at this bull-session brainstorm reception for a state senator, I think it was.” He rolls over, away from Padgett. “I remember her skin looked blue almost, so pale, like the blood would just ripple out if you bit her cheek. I was eager to lose it, though. I was so scrawny, approaching a girl for sex felt like a noodle asking someone to the movies.”

“You were sixteen,” Padgett forgives him.

“Well, damn right. Somehow I’m in her apartment, it felt so grown-up, thirty floors up in the elevator, all these fuzzy rugs, and photographs everywhere of the two of them, this quiet girl and the grinning fratty fiancé, in tuxedos, on a boat, some resort restaurant under an umbrella. We hardly spoke or anything, just did it quick, and she tells me to leave. I figure it’s one last fling before the walk down the aisle, right?”

“Oh.”

“No, the oh is next week or so, her dad mentions, just so the staff will know, he died in some blizzard, the fiancé, some avalanche in Colorado—I remember, I was so young it was before I knew people skied there—like six months previous.”

The Vic rolls back. His eyes are coaly, the least shiny eyes Padgett has seen that weren’t on a cave painting. “She wasn’t sexy,” he says. “She wasn’t daring anything. It was grief. She was broken,” and Padgett does not know whether to reach to him or—