Bernard Keller plays bass in the worship band at the church we go to about two Sundays in three.

He is somewhere in his fifties, he drives a van with a company name on it, he does something with commercial heating, and he has been standing on the left-hand side of that platform with a five-string bass for as long as I have been going there, which is eleven years.

He is also, I later learned, a man who buys and sells instruments constantly in a small way, which is what half of the people in a church band are.

Julian had put the guitar on a regional musicians’ forum on the Friday, with four photographs, for nine hundred dollars.