ON MY WAY HOME, I FOUND A SMALL BAR WITH A BANNER ADVERTISING hamburgers over the door. It was as dark inside as it was outside. A few old men were sitting at the counter, hunched over their beers. I could feel them staring at me as I walked over to a table and sat down. A waitress appeared, an older woman with heavy makeup and a low tank top revealing wrinkled cleavage. Her face was very sallow, as if she hadn’t set foot outside the bar in many years. There was a blank look in her eyes that told me she wasn’t really seeing me even as she said, “What can I get you?”

“The hamburger,” I replied. “Rare. And a whiskey.”

As she walked back to the kitchen to put in my order the men at the bar yelled to her, “Barbara! You didn’t even say hello!”

She ignored them, but they were at her again when she came out with my food. “Are you deaf or something, Barbara? We’re talking to you!”

She put my burger, whiskey, and check down at the same time, then picked up her step a little to get back to the kitchen. The men didn’t speak when Barbara was gone, but they did turn on their stools to watch me eat. I didn’t care. The burger was seasoned perfectly, with a thick ripe tomato and blood dripping off the lightly toasted bun. I became completely absorbed in eating it.

When I was done, my stomach stretched tight with food, I stuffed a wad of money into the bill book and left the bar. I probably tipped that waitress a hundred bucks. I thought of something my dad liked to say: “Only the rich are stingy.”

I CAN SEE LONNIE WALKING OUT THE DOOR OF HER BROWNSTONE, leaving it unlocked, and driving away. I can see her at a bartending job in some other, smaller city, collecting cash tips, living alone, getting old and sallow like that waitress. She would learn to distrust attention from men, since so much of it would be unwanted. She would go home and turn the TV on for company. This is more or less what happened to my own mother, what I imagine probably happened to the LeRoi woman who’d abandoned her daughter if she was still alive. Though it enters my mind often, I don’t like thinking of Lonnie this way.

She might’ve left with Carlow, but I didn’t like that ending either. Their lives wouldn’t have ended up so different, and anyway it wasn’t what she wanted, it seemed to me. She never spoke about him, in her journal or coded in her fiction, as anything so incredible. He was merely a remembrance of past excitements. In the Hamptons, I even felt she might be trying to pawn him off on me.