“Christ, no.” Luke still had the cloth pressed to his forehead. It was warm now, but it felt good. He wished he had pants on, though, which he supposed was another sign that he was feeling closer to his normal self. “It’s . . . I’m good. Really. Thank you.”

Kitty nodded. She sidled past his car to the end of his driveway, dropped her board, and placed one colorful sneaker on top of it. Luke called after her.

“It was nice meeting you.” Standing there in his boxer shorts, like an asshole.

“Right,” she said.

And then Luke blurted something he hadn’t for at least two and a half years, because he was tired of saying it, and nobody believed him anyway.

“I didn’t do it, you know.” He lowered the cloth and looked at her with tired, bloodshot eyes. “I didn’t.”

Kitty nodded, then she was gone, just the sound of her wheels on the asphalt.

“This was, what . . .” Floyd mumbled. Vernon had refreshed his bourbon and he took a sip now. “Two weeks ago?”

Luke nodded. “Two, yeah . . . shit, nearly three weeks ago.”

“You seen her since?”

“It’s not like that, Floyd. Jesus, she’s young enough to be my daughter.”

“That’s not what I meant.” Floyd reached across the table and clutched Luke’s bare forearm, his fingers still strong, despite his sickness—fingers that had glided up and down guitar necks in the company of Aretha Franklin and Ray Charles and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. “I’m thinking you need more people in your life. More friends.”

Luke shrugged. “I have you.”

“For now.” A frown ran all the way from Floyd’s eyebrows, over his bald and beautiful head, to the fuzz of silver hair at the back of his skull. “But we both know you’re going to want a more long-term arrangement.”

This prompted a moment of silence between them, inescapably somber despite the joyous soul music on the sound system. Luke looked away from his friend, his gaze drawn to the posters tacked to the deep red walls, and the cheery faces punctuating both sides of the bar. This was where Luke had met Lisa. She’d been singing backup with a band called Generous Joe and the Breathers. Luke had approached her after the first set, told her he liked the sound of her voice, and that she could breathe for him anytime. Lisa raised one eyebrow in a way that was endearing then, but would irritate the living shit out of him in later years, and suggested he work on his pickup lines. She let him buy her a drink at the end of the night, though, and then take her to dinner at Taix French Restaurant the following week. And that—to sorely misquote the great Humphrey Bogart—was the beginning of an occasionally beautiful friendship.