“Why?”

“Just asking.”

I want to describe what the next fortnight was, because it is the stupidest two weeks of my life and because everybody who does this does it.

I built a theory.

March the ninth was stitched into a napkin in my grandmother’s hiding place, and March the ninth was the day my father bought a vehicle he could not afford, and the deposit amounts in the book had gone up in the spring of that same year, and by about the fourth evening I had a page of connections in blue biro that looked, I am not exaggerating, like something off a wall in a film.

I checked the truck.