It took me nine days and two telephone calls to a dealership in Shelby County who were perfectly nice about it and had no reason to tell me anything and told me anyway because I said I was settling an estate.

Richard bought that truck on the twenty-third of March.

Not the ninth.

Tyler had guessed, on a Tuesday, while holding a stack of birthday cards, about a date he had no reason to remember.

And I had built nine days of architecture on it.

I sat at my kitchen table on the twenty-fourth of October with a page of blue biro in front of me and understood something about myself that I did not enjoy.

I had wanted it to be the truck.