2 A.M. at The Cat's Pajamas

1:45 A.M

The band goes on break.

Sarina and her ex-husband stand outside on the curb, sucking on Parliament Lights.

“What is it?” Marcos says. “You love him? You don’t care that he’s married?”

“They’re separated,” she says.

“Well.” He takes a drag. “Shit.”

“I like spending time with him.” She kicks at the building’s bricks.

“Nothing clarifies feelings faster than jealousy.”

“You and Cassidy serious?”

He shakes his head. “As serious as you can be with a girl who has never heard of Steely Dan.”

“You’re kidding.”

“She thought it was a dish cleaner.”

Ben and Cassidy appear in the doorway.

“Who wants a drink?” Cassidy says.

“I do, darling.” Marcos toes out his cigarette.

“I’ll fix you one.” Her volume startles a trio of texting girls. “Am I talking to you?” she says, before disappearing inside with Marcos.

Sarina should be happy to be back in what has become their ready position of the night; however, Ben seems like a different person, one who has danced capably with someone else. Twenty years have passed since the night of their prom yet he is the same. His ludicrous way of smiling all the time. The cheap green of his eyes, not the color of shamrocks (something lucky) or emeralds (something valuable), but of dying field grass, chestnut wheat. The figure of his pupil moves like a horse amid these lousy, dry grains. Are they hazel or brown? DECIDE. His untried lawyer’s hands. Unable to build a bureau. The cavity of his morals: leaving her over and over, for this theater girl or that wife. Flat-footed on the pavement. His eyebrows assist in all of his famous expressions, the one where he hopes the magic trick will please the little girl: magic tricks for kids, the preoccupations of a never-do-well, never do for her, never a groomsman, always a groom. Look at him, one hand pocketed, the other flirting around the base of his sand-colored hair. Look at him: the rose color creeping into his cheeks — the first signal he is about to laugh. Look at him. She looks at him.

“Would you like another drink, Miss Greene?”

She nods.

“Let me guess. Whiskey?”

He pauses, framed in the doorway. She sees how he will be as an old man. Finely shaped calves in gray pants. The sallow, lightable cheeks. This is the meanest thing he can do: know her drink and act tenderly. To show her the exact form of what she can sit beside but not keep. In the jaundiced light of a streetlamp, Sarina realizes why people have children: to see the face of the one they love at the ages they’ve missed, to see his eyes on a son she could teach to use scissors.