I had spent four thousand one hundred of it on a funeral six weeks earlier.

I want to describe what those ninety minutes were like, because they are the reason I wrote this account and not the wedding.

It was not fear about the money, although there was some of that.

It was that I had just spent five weeks constructing a man.

A sad, careful, funny, self-aware man who had done one manipulative thing for a small human reason and had apologized for it in his own handwriting.

And a window envelope from Iowa put a second thing on the table, and I could not tell — sitting on a stair on the twenty-first of February — whether the letter had been an apology or an anaesthetic.