If it seems too good to be true, it probably is

“I will have a double Patron margarita” was the very first thing he ever said to me.

He said more about the preparation and the type of glass. But I don’t need to be told how to make a margarita. I’ve literally made 10,000 of them. Sure, I heard all his little variations, every single one of which I’ve heard before.

Double drinks are always a flag, maybe not exactly red, but certainly violet (red and blue) or maybe even brown (red and green). Alcohol is one of the few things we ingest that enters the bloodstream through the stomach and not the intestines. It gets absorbed faster, which is damning in regard to volume — and doubly damning when dealing with higher-proof alcohols.

He was probably in his mid-60s when he ordered that margarita, and for the five years or so that he came into our establishment, he was extremely pleasant and generous. The woman who came with him was neither.

Their long lunches were spent languidly sipping margaritas and nibbling on appetizers. I can remember quite a few sunny summer afternoons, a mild autumn day or two, and even a few rainy winter ones.

He looked you in the eye in a way that made you trust him.

Only, I never trusted him. I’m not sure exactly why — maybe it was the double drinks — but he just seemed too good to be true.

I’m sure he never realized that I felt that way, because in customer service it’s never a great idea to let people in on your internal dialogue.

Someone once asked me why I never drink at work.

I responded, “If I do that, then I say what I think, and that’s not always a winning proposition.”

“In vino veritas” is the Latin saying for “In wine there is truth,” but what the Romans didn’t say was that sometimes that “truth” is better left unsaid.

People often came up to him and shook his hand. He was in finance, business or real estate, or something like that. I got used to his 30% tips, and on $40 drinks that can add up quickly. But I also knew something that good couldn’t last. In my long career, I have seen this sort of thing happen over and over again.

Soon enough, he started coming in without his sidekick — not always, but sometimes. And pretty soon he came in pretty regularly when a certain server was working. It didn’t seem obvious at first, but my bartender intuition caught on pretty quickly — partly because of him, and partly because of her.

“Is that a different shade of lipstick?” one of the other servers asked her.

“And your hair looks different.”

If by “different” she meant meticulously styled, then yes, I would have had to agree. But I have learned that the only truly safe comment on someone else’s appearance is on their shoes. And I learned that from a woman.

Eventually, even his sidekick started to wonder. I can even remember the day.

“Your usual?” asked the server.

His sidekick took one look at her, and then one look at him, and then what followed was an awful lot of uncomfortableness for him, for her, for the server and for me.

Sometime later he stopped coming in, and sometime after that, it became obvious why. It was in all the papers and on the news. Turned out he was a money manager of some kind, and the sidekick was the company accountant as well as his mistress — until she wasn’t. Then she was a plea deal witness at his trial for embezzlement.

He fled the country — also in the news — and his company suffered through an embarrassing media blitz. In fact, I’m not sure if that company survived. I also never saw the sidekick again, or the server, because she too left the country.

Leaving me with these thoughts:

• Sidekick, co-conspirator, mistress — it’s all just semantics.

• Ernest Hemingway drank double drinks. And things ultimately didn’t turn out so great for him, either. Just saying.

• Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. So, just imagine two scorned women, and maybe even a third.

• I hear Zihuatanejo, Mexico, is nice this time of year — and that their margaritas are quite good.

• If someone is cheating with you, eventually they are going to be cheating on you too.