There would have been a conversation in which the crop became a misunderstanding, and then a conversation in which the misunderstanding became my overreaction, and by the weekend the subject would have been my refusal to let his mother see the babies.

She was not being kind.

She was asking for an adjournment.

And the only reason I did not grant it is that I was too tired and too sore to be managed, which is a thing I have come to think of as the single piece of luck in the whole business.

Exhausted people are very hard to steer.

There is nothing left in them to appeal to.

Part Fifty-One: He Came In First