Genuinely — properly furious for about eleven seconds, in the way of a kid who has discovered that an adult has been sitting on something.

“You wrote it?

Why didn’t you say?”

“You didn’t ask.”

“When?”

“January 2011.

About one in the morning.”

“Why?”

And I told him the truth, which took about two minutes, and which was the first piece of the real story I ever gave my son.

I told him that before he was born his mother and I had one truck and no money, and that she did the books at a card table because we could not afford a desk, and that one night a customer went under owing us more money than we had ever had at once, and she sat up doing the same column over and over because she could not make the number be different.