It wasn’t that he’d care. It was just embarrassing. Jess had been at Bloom for a few months by then. They owned the Half Moon but it was still so new. They weren’t behind yet, though a simple comparison of the profit and loss sheets month over month, charted on a graph, predicted very clearly where the line was headed if something didn’t change. She’d followed that line to its obvious conclusion, had stayed late at work one evening creating a spreadsheet so she could show Malcolm. And she’d been generous! There were expenses she didn’t know about, surely. The unpaid tabs. The unspoken etiquette of cash put down on a table and then pushed away. The macroeconomics of an entire industry, how to tip and why and when and to whom and how much. Cash passed in envelopes or folded into thick wedges and tucked into shirt pockets. Stacked in a safe deposit box, sure, but also removed in denominations of one inch, two inches. But when she brought home this presentation of facts, he glanced at it exactly once and then told her to just tell him what it said. When she explained, said they’d be in the red within six months, said they’d be up an actual creek if they didn’t make a change—get an investor or sell or come up with a brand-new idea for how to get bodies in a dingy room, buying drinks—he said her work was too binary, what with its columns for profit and loss, success and failure. His world was full of nuance, determined by moods, weather, current events. If the Mets made it to the World Series, the bar would kill it in October. Things like that couldn’t be captured on a spreadsheet, he said, and she said yes it certainly could, she’d done it, all he had to do was look.