The clinic won’t see him again without a deposit.

Four hundred and eighty dollars.”

The three women went completely silent.

One of them pulled the velcro on her glove.

And my mother said: “I have guests, Roland.”

I said, “The doctor says it could go to his chest.”

And Agnes Thorne said — and this is the one, this is the sentence I have been carrying since the eleventh of April 2007 —

“We have nothing to say to you in public.”