“So are you! Oh, my God, I love your hair!” Tatina said, laughing. “August is always going on about how smart you are, what a good person you are, and how you keep him honest. ‘That’s one smart kid,’ he always says.”

“Seriously?” Lucy said, cutting me a look.

“Don’t let it go to your head, kid,” I said.

“And you broke up with her?” Lucy said to me. “By Skype? Are you nuts?”

“Lucy—”

“He was drunk,” Tatina said with theatrical disgust. “Talking about how I deserved better than him and how everybody he gets close to gets hurt.”

“Well, statistically,” Lucy said, “there’s, like, a five point three percent likelihood of that actually happening, yeah.”

I was starting to feel a schoolboy’s sense of shame and embarrassment flush my cheeks.

“Oh, rubbish!” Tatina said. “And then I ask him what’s going on, and he says it’s best I don’t know. Like I’m a child! Then he has the grotesque audacity to burp and hang up!”

“You burped at her?” Lucy said trying not to laugh. “Jesus, Sherlock!”

“Lucy, I swear to God—”

“Well,” Lucy said, “looks like from the old clock on the wall I should be getting home.” Then in a mock aside to Tatina, she said, “Cut him a little slack, okay? Been kinda rough for the big guy lately.” Passing by me on the way to the door, Lucy whispered, “Oh, you are in such deep doo-doo, bro.”

Tatina and I stood facing each other for what felt like a long, awkward time.

Not knowing exactly what excuse I could pull out of my ass, I said, “Listen—”

“Before you go any further,” she said sternly, “I just need you to know my original flight was canceled. The next best flight I could get was from Oslo to Berlin, Berlin to Boston, Boston to New York, then here. I’ve been in a very bad mood for the past seventeen hours. So. I’m not in the mood for any bullshit. Understood?”

“Understood,” I said, walking to her.

Then I kissed her.

She abruptly pulled out of our kiss, and said, “Don’t kiss me when I’m mad at you. It’s just rude.”

I sat at my kitchen island watching Tatina pour my liquor stock down the drain, including a barely touched bottle of Redbreast fifteen-year-old Irish whiskey.

“Don’t you think that’s a little extreme?” I said, interrupting my own twenty-minute confession of shortcomings, failings, transgressions and sins. “Shouldn’t you, as a former bartender, see how senseless that is?”