“Whatever comes out.

Wes is fine.

I’m not going to be upset about it, and if anybody ever tells you you should call me something, you come and tell me and I’ll deal with it.”

He said, “Okay,” in exactly his mother’s voice, and then he asked whether I had ever driven a truck into anything, and I said yes, a fence, in 2004, and that was the end of the formal part.

He called me Wes for fourteen months.

Part Twelve: The Thing I Tried to Do With Money

I moved eighty thousand dollars into an account in her name in the last week of January and I did not tell her I was going to.

I want to describe the thinking honestly, because at the time it felt like generosity and it was nothing of the kind.

What I actually felt was unbearable.

I had a number in my head — seven years and seven months — and it was going up every day, and there was no action available to me that reduced it.