“Pour this into a crystal tumbler, two fingers deep, and give it a tender swirl,” he purred. “Highland peat is hard to beat.”

Ordinarily she hated the bossy free advice of strangers, but she’d seen the way he talked to the storekeeper and realized that this was the way he acted with everyone. His condescension was avuncular. She began looking forward to running into him in the whisky aisle. This happened every month or two, always on a Sunday. He would be dressed like a dandy on his way to the races: silk pocket square, straw fedora, but there was usually something amiss—unbuttoned fly, flip-flops, bags of sweating frozen pizzas waiting in the car.

“Absolutely no ice. To release its flavor, add a touch of water. Just a touch. But whatever you do, never, never American tap water, unless the taste of chlorine appeals to you.” “Blends are junior high; you want college, at the very least.” “A blood tub is a very small cask some distilleries use to speed up maturity. It’s faster because there’s more contact with the wood. But I prefer my whisky to fester in its own time.”

Around their fifth or sixth encounter, they introduced themselves to each other. No plans for any whisky meetups were made—they knew their kind of drinking was best done alone.

She found it soothing as she drank in the solitude of her living room that Raymond was doing the same in his house across the street. She often watched him from one of her upstairs rooms. Framed brilliantly in his picture window, he was like a silent movie that replayed itself over and over every night. He sat in his favorite armchair with a crystal tumbler of something, holding animated conversations with people she never saw, conducting symphonies she never heard. Once in a while he would get careless and stagger around the house with his robe wide open, forgetting that a window worked both ways. It was delicious how she never ran into him at the supermarket or the bank or the drugstore—it was only ever Union Liquors.

It was also at their liquor store that he asked her, a few weeks ago, “When are you due?”

Mortified that he’d noticed her recent weight gain, she accepted his misguided joshing with a chortle.

“No, seriously, my dear,” he said, “you shouldn’t be drinking like this if you’re having a baby.”

Kate dropped two slices of bread down the toaster and twisted the lid off the strawberry jam. While she waited, famished, she gulped down her third glass of milk.