Lou sat at a table uncluttered by other admirers. She was the best-looking woman in the bar—I was big enough to admit that. She was one of those beautiful women who never took much care of her face at all; the humidity had caused her mascara to bloom under her eyes, and her bright copper hair was damp at the temples. The heat had softened her like warmed chocolate.

Here’s my idea of a good bar: a clean, ill-lighted space. No pink drinks. No hula statuettes. Certainly no dangling stuffed parrots strangled by fairy lights. But this bar had Lou. She looked up, smiled. The drink in front of her was so orange it glowed, turning the underside of her chin the color of a sunrise. It looked like the sort of drink that made you hug strangers before you hugged a toilet.

“Is it spring break already?” I slid into the seat across from her, catching the glass with the tip of my finger and stealing a sip from her straw. An explosion of sugar and foam and one sickly zing of rum down my throat. I grimaced, and Lou laughed.

“For six dollars a pop, you can rewire your palate,” she said, grabbing the little purple umbrella from the glass and tucking it behind my ear. I brushed the garnish out of my hair and onto the floor. Lou laughed again, a full-throated sound. I could feel the disappointment and panic still tugging at me, but it was easier to ignore now, as though one sip of her cocktail had washed the taste of Robert Jackal’s failings right out of my mouth.

“I ordered you the Bombs Away,” Lou said. “Since we’re celebrating.”

Celebrating. Right. “Oh, you ordered for me.”

“You’ll like it.”

“You know what I’d say to Jackal if he decided what I’d have without asking?”

Lou dimpled. “I have some idea. You’ll drink it because I’m buying.” She took another sip. “You like the place?”

Behind Lou, some kid at the jukebox threw on a classic rock song popular at least a decade before he was born, and the carved wooden hula dancer in the corner swayed offbeat. Every time someone ordered one of the specialty cocktails—Enjoy Our Blasted Good Bikini Atoll!, a Jäger bomb in the center of a lake of curaçao—a cardboard volcano spewed tissue-paper lava and cardboard people at its base shook and danced.

“Hate it,” I said.

“You never like anything I like!”

“I don’t think that’s true. It’s just that I have better taste in most things.”

Lou arched an eyebrow. “Robert?”

“Most things.”