Karen is thirty-nine by a week and two days: old enough to be the boy’s parent. She meets his gaze out of politeness and does her best to maintain a reserved, neutral smile. One of her hands holds her glass and the other rests low on her thigh, making sure her skirt is as close to her knees as she can get it before she crosses her legs.

“I like older faces,” the boy clarifies, smiling back.

She doesn’t know what to say, feels it might not be proper to say anything, just as it isn’t proper to be here, in St. Augustine, in the bar of the Lutie Matanzas Hotel. Still, the boy, for some reason, holds his smile in anticipation of her response, and she is prepared to say So do I, for lack of anything else, when a voice from across the room declares, “You won’t.”

The boy looks over his shoulder. “Won’t what?”

“Like old faces. Not when you see one in the mirror.”

The voice is vowel-heavy, more like what Karen has become accustomed to in her current life in Savannah than what she remembers from her Florida childhood. It belongs to the little silver-haired man who easily looks old enough to be her parent. He crosses his legs just as Karen is crossing hers and, with the slightest movement of one hand, rattles the ice in his highball glass.

The boy glances at Karen in an assumed alliance. “It was a metaphor.”

“Your metaphor is moot. This hotel is already sold.”

Karen watches the boy frown as he turns off his Discman. “No way.”

“I’m afraid so,” the man says calmly. “And while I do have plans to remodel, I would hardly call myself a fat cat.”

The boy looks to the bartender, but she, a young woman in a starched white shirt and yellow bow tie, only confirms this—and her alliance to her new employer—by nodding and smiling professionally.

An awkward silence ensues. Karen glances at the three of them, in turn, and is alarmed to find them all looking back at her. She has the urge to let go of her club soda and flee the room.

“No drastic remodeling, of course,” the little man tells her warmly. “A few nips, a couple of tucks. Just because we’re married to gravity doesn’t mean we can’t cheat with style.”