The walls of the bar had long since been marked by the consumers, those who stayed and those who left. The boy stared at some of the gouges and asked the bartender why he didn’t repair them.

The bartender’s best customer laughed and responded instead. “Because that’s when Ku over there proposed to her wife. The fight beforehand sort of preempted it. Good memories.”

The boy didn’t understand that and said so.

“Eh, you’d have had to have been there. But I could tell you all about it anyway, if you’d li-”

He almost missed it, looking away, but at the corner of his eye he saw the bartender shaking his head. The customer paused, then shrugged.

“Nah. Maybe when you’re older.”

The boy was older than he was a minute ago. He said that too.

The customer laughed. “You’ve really got a keeper here, keep.”

Confused, the boy looked at the bartender, catching his smile.

The the boy and the bartender looked away from each other, embarrassed.