“Is he all right?”

The woman considered that for longer than I expected.

“He’s got a job and a mortgage and he’s fine,” she said. “He wrote that check three weeks before they let him go and he didn’t tell me he’d written it, and I found out in the spring when I was doing the taxes.

That’s the part. That’s what he can’t do.” She glanced back into the house. “He’s not angry at you. He’s angry that he was the kind of man who wrote twelve hundred dollars he didn’t have to a woman he’d met twice, because a guy on his floor asked him to, and it turned out to be nothing.

He’d have to look at that to talk to you. He doesn’t want to look at it.”

“That’s fair.”