Sherri tried to pick it up, awkwardly bending backwards instead of forward, her chest cantilevered while trying to hold the tray so it wouldn’t tip. She had a lot of stuff to balance: ashtrays, mugs, lighters, matches, bar checks. She wondered if he’d dropped the damn card on purpose.

Derzon gave his friend a nudge. “They’re not allowed to bend forward, you know.”

They? He could have been talking about an animal at the zoo. “But you are,” she spoke under her breath, risking a demerit.

“I’ll get it,” Arthur said. He scooched back his chair to help her, but she already had the card in her hand. Their heads bumped, and when they both stood up at the same time, their faces bumped, too, almost like a kiss. He smiled, a sweet, funny smile. He had firm lips, a sharp nose, and a nice, square jaw, although his features didn’t all go together; he had the kind of face she needed to look at a few times. She adjusted her ears and set the key on the table in front of Jerry. “You know you don’t need to show your key here. Just in the club.” She wanted to embarrass the jerk. She didn’t think of him as a real guest, he was just a guy from town, but then again, wasn’t that what most of the guests were? The only difference was that Jerry was the guy she knew.

He tapped the ashes of his cigar into the ashtray as casually as if he were sitting in his own den. “You know, I didn’t have you pegged as a Bunny. Not that you can’t pull it off, I don’t mean it like that, but…”

“But what?”

“Well, you being from home and all. Remember how you and that friend of yours used to pretend the bandstand was a fort and you’d throw pinecones at anyone who walked by and shout ‘Intruders!’?”

“We were dumb little kids.” Sherri could feel herself blush. Arthur could tell she was embarrassed and looked into his lap.

“Sherri grew up right on the square,” Jerry said. “Great building with a storefront and, above it, a nice two-bedroom apartment.”

“You should buy it,” Sherri said. “It’s for sale.”

Arthur seemed impressed. “You’re from downtown?”

Jerry roared with laughter. “Downtown! I never heard nobody call it that in my whole damn life. Downtown, heh.” It felt as if everyone in the café turned to see what the noise was about.