His name is Dustin Vandermolen and everybody calls him Dusty and he was thirty-one years old and he had worked behind that counter for four and a half years, and he is the person this story actually happened to, and he does not appear anywhere in the version that went round our town.

Here is what he did, on the Monday afternoon, at about ten past four.

A thirteen-year-old boy came into a pawn shop on Fifth Street with a games console in a Target bag and nine games and asked how much he could get.

And Dusty Vandermolen, who has two children of his own, aged six and two, and who had been doing the job long enough to know precisely what the statute said, looked at that kid and asked him what the money was for.

And my son told him.