“Understood, Mrs.

Weaver,” he said.

“I’ll let him know he has to provide another form of payment from his personal checking account before we release his keys.”

He hung up without another word.

By noon, the summer sun sat heavy over Carl’s machine shed, baking the gravel turnaround until the air above the rocks shimmered like liquid glass.

Ben sat on an upside-down wooden bushel basket near the pump house, looking down at his feet.

On the dry clover next to his feet lay his old canvas track shoes, the black electrical tape around the split left sole peeling at the edges from weeks of garden dirt.