I sat at that island and read eleven pages of an SEC administrative proceeding and did the arithmetic on a scrap of paper like a man checking a bill.

Sentenced the ninth of February.

Dead, according to my wife, on the twelfth.

Three days.

Somebody chose that date, and I have never been able to decide whether it was because it was easier to remember or because it was, in some way that I do not have the equipment to understand, honest.

Here is how the lie worked, and I set it out because the first question anybody asks is how it could possibly have survived nine years, and the answer is that it was not difficult at all.

The Rasks were from Milwaukee.