Clara put her feet on the floor.

“Let me come with you.”

“Keep the stove in,” I said.

“I’ll take the truck.”

She looked at me for a bit in the dark.

And then she said a thing that she would tell me, nineteen years later, in a diner, that she had thought about every day since.

She said: “Roland, she only calls when she wants something stripped down.”

I was twenty-nine years old.

I had a drafty workshop by the creek with my grandfather’s lathe in it, four hundred and ten dollars in a credit union account, a woman who was going to marry me in the spring, and no idea at all that I was about to spend nineteen years being poor on purpose.

Part Two: The Brick House

The estate is a brick house on the hill above Silver Plume with a row of blue spruce across the front that nobody has cut back since 1988.

I did not go to the front door.

I have used the side porch since I was eleven years old and I used it that night, and I came into the living room without knocking, which in that house is a thing you only do once.

The radiators were off.