And I know almost exactly how, because I know what he owed, and it is Part Forty-Two, and it is forty-two thousand dollars.

Forty-two thousand, and a man rounding up for a cushion, and arriving at sixty-eight.

That is the number.

There is no cleverness in it.

It is a man at a kitchen table with a calculator and a stack of demands working out what would make it stop, and then going to a bank with his mother’s book and writing a figure he had invented on a withdrawal slip in a line at a counter.

And here is the thing that I cannot get past and that I think about at odd times, in the car, in a queue.