I folded the page back along its creases and didn’t answer him.

Irene was sitting on my porch steps when I got home, with a sandwich wrapped in wax paper that she made me eat on my feet.

“Four hundred dollars,” I told her.

“In cash tonight, if I sign his paper.”

“And what’s the paper say?”

“That I keep quiet.”

She mulled it over while I ate.

“Four hundred dollars would get your boy his medicine on Monday,” she said.