I had a Jenkins porch job booked for the February and I went in for five sheets of oak ply and two kegs of sixteen-penny framing nails and he put his hands flat on the counter and could not look at me.

“I can’t do it, Roland.”

“My account’s clear.

I paid Tuesday.”

And Harold said: “Your father called me at eight this morning.”

Thaddeus Thorne sat on the board of the local branch for nineteen years.

He was not a banker; he was a name on a letterhead and a seat at four lunches a year, which is what a man with a family business becomes in a town that small.

But he knew Harold, and Harold had a line of credit at that branch, and my father telephoned him from his study at eight in the morning and said that his son’s business was a bad risk and that the family would not be standing behind any overruns.