One of their customers was a writer named Mark. She’d met him when he’d been hired to write a piece for one of the magazines, which he turned in late. Neither had been impressed with the other, and he hadn’t asked her out until he’d seen her slide past the line at Great Jones at 2:00 a.m. He made love competently and energetically, but entirely in his own head, watching. She’d seen him peering down his long flat stomach at his erection with more obvious admiration than she managed. In his novels, he made striking observations without real curiosity, and certainly without empathy, and that would eventually leave him without much of a career when the novelty wore off.

But Polly was unkind. Mark had all the right pieces around a flawed, sulky core. She liked his friends, liked the glow—the second novel was getting advance talk—and she was so bruised by the attempt to open the restaurant that she rolled along, mostly smiling, even when Mark introduced her as Papa’s granddaughter. Great-granddaughter, she’d say, looking the other way, reaching for a glass.

“Well, he raised you,” Mark would snap. “The Arc of the Mind, you know, Myths and Variations. Dated now, but revolutionary in the day.”

They, she thought. They raised me. And not really; they were gone before she was nine. Though it was true that they had changed everything in the world.

She and Jimmy began serving to friends while the kitchen was still Visqueened, wires exposed, drywall not yet taped. On this particular afternoon, an eighteen-year-old actor named Drake had been in for scraps and stayed too long, and now Polly was catching up, moving too quickly between a crap stove and a jerry-rigged hot plate, stirring lemon curd while she told Jimmy a story about the kid’s affair with a producer’s daughter, the hours he’d spent hiding naked in a dumbwaiter at the Dakota.

Polly laughed at her own story and water from the double boiler splashed onto the hot plate wiring. The shock threw her against the industrial shelving five feet away as if the room had tilted and she’d fallen out a window, as if someone had yanked her into a crevasse.

“Oh, Evie,” she said from the floor. “What a surprise.”

But it was Barry the cheese seller bending over her with a different kind of soft eyes; he’d just arrived with a delivery of illicit raw milk cheeses. Polly felt slow-muscled but clear, dreamy and lucid, like a flu victim on cool sheets after a fever breaks. From the level of alarm—Jimmy was keening—she wondered if her hair had changed color, if her ears were bleeding, if she’d peed her pants. She wondered if she were dead, but when she started to cry the tears were convulsive, almost ecstatic.

But Barry was calm.

“I fall all the time,” said Polly.