She looked up and saw him watching her. Hurrying to his table, she tore a ticket off her pad and laid it on his table. “I am sorry to leave you sitting there so long, Peyton,” she said, “but the bartender called in sick, one waitress didn’t show, and the cook slipped in grease on the floor and twisted his ankle. The manager is in the kitchen frying fish, and I am covering the bar. Just leave your money on the table and I will get it later, unless you need change?”

“No,” he said, “I don’t need change. But do you need help?”

“What?”

“I don’t have to be anywhere. Can I help you?”

“You are serious?”

“Yeah. Like I said, I’ve got nowhere to be.”

She seemed to think it over, then exclaimed, “Bless you, Peyton! You can tend bar. Come with me.”

“But I never tended bar. I’m only fif—”

“Do not worry.” She had him by the hand and didn’t appear willing to change course. “These people are fishermen. They never order anything but beer and whiskey. Neither do their women.” She took him behind the bar and showed him the bottle opener, the taps, and the shot glasses. Then she gave him a quick lesson on the cash register and pointed out a list with the prices of everything tacked to the wall behind the bar. “Anybody gets rough with you, come and get me.”

With that, Gina was gone. He watched her disappear into the kitchen before someone at the end of the bar called out, “Barkeep!”

Peyton had no idea what he was doing, so he decided to imitate every bartender he had ever seen in the movies. He tossed a bar towel over his shoulder, walked down to face his customer, and said with a smile, “What’s your pleasure, my friend?”

“Take a pint an’ a shot.”

“Comin’ right up.” Peyton’s height and build made him look older than he actually was, so nobody questioned why a kid was running a fish camp bar. He followed Gina’s instructions and soon had served his first customer and collected his first nickel tip, which he dropped into a glass beneath the bar.

As the night wore on, food orders slowed down and drink orders picked up. Peyton helped Gina and the other waitress, another Cuban girl named Leya, load their trays and collect their tabs. And he found that the more he talked to the people at the bar—rather, the more he let them talk to him—the bigger they tipped. His mother would probably call that doing a good thing for a bad reason.

Maybe so. But Peyton had decided something: Any new thing you try, from spotting race cars to tending bar, has its own rhythm. And once you tap into the rhythm of a thing, you can get the hang of it.

“Santo cielo, here they go again,” Gina said as she returned to the bar from the kitchen, where she had loaded a tray with clean beer mugs. She nodded toward the jukebox, where a couple had just begun to dance. The woman was tall and wiry with bleached hair cut short. She wore a tight lemon-yellow dress, white high-heeled shoes, and way too much jewelry. The man was wearing trousers and what looked like a bowling shirt, only it was covered with a loud parrot print. His hair was slicked back with tonic, and he wore a thick gold chain bracelet on his left wrist.