The whole thing had come apart and put itself back together in the wrong order, and the man who could have explained it was in the ground behind the meeting house.

I thought about Brenda standing in the lot with her hand out, and I waited for the anger to come up the way it had come up every night for three years, and it didn’t come.

That was the part I couldn’t get level.

In the morning I was at Frank’s desk before he had the drawer unlocked.

He had my father’s gold watch in there under a rubber band and a stack of registration cards, and I paid him back the two hundred and ten dollars in twenties and told him I would be in and out of the office all week with a truck.

At the bank, Victor met me at the counter with his seal in his pocket and his hands already fussing at his chin.