Lars had no idea what she meant, but he didn’t say that. He was nineteen then and knew enough to know that it was important to get in good with your girl’s mom. Not too good, though; Karen was the kind who would make a pass at you. He’d fielded several in high school. His mom was not that kind of mom. His mom was older, fragile, sexless, with her prematurely gray hair always in a braid, her flat dancer’s chest, her big feet. Lars loved that Jen dressed up sexy for him—well, for a while it was for him. He’d bought her that stupid purse to encourage her, and to telegraph that he saw himself as someone who could one day afford to buy her lots of things like that. Because he knew that’s what she wanted. Wasn’t it what they all wanted? And he did expect to have money, vaguely. He’d started bar-backing at a local steak house at eighteen and was writing the cocktail menu by twenty-two. The loose plan was to keep on tending bar, get to know the distributors, start working sales, then maybe open his own place with seed money from some of his rich high school buddies by the time he was thirty.

But that hadn’t happened. He got his associate’s, and an entry level job at Seagram’s, but the combination of a job involving alcohol and an increasingly volatile romantic relationship was toxic. He started missing morning appointments. Jen put him through the ringer. She was a talker. Every little thing, every disagreement, they had to have it out. Round after round all night long in her bedroom, or on the back porch in the dark, or in one of their cars. Pleading and accusing and apologizing, over and over and over. Then a couple days of silence, of wondering if it was finally the end, then a text and a tender-dirty fuck and they were back on.

So, at twenty-four it was back to bartending; by twenty-seven he’d missed out on investing in two different bars because he couldn’t come up with the ten grand when it came time. How did anybody save ten thousand dollars working behind a bar? If his mom hadn’t gotten cancer he might have asked his parents for the money, but she had, and then Jen got pregnant, and he drank more, and now at twenty-eight he was back in his old bedroom in Port Jeff, working nights at the bar and days at the fucking Verizon store to pay child support just to keep out of jail. His son cried when he came to take him for their afternoons together, his former classmates posted Instagram photos of their sky-high Manhattan apartments, and every year seemed to be a new lesson in the shittiness of white male life.