Either you go and clean my mother's apartment right now, my husband said, or tomorrow I file for divorce — six months out of work, living on my salary, saying it with a beer in his hand. I didn't argue. I took the keys and walked out. What was behind his mother's door turned that threat around on him inside forty minutes.

Northrun Supply Co. was wound up. There is a separate matter concerning the tax treatment of eight months of revenue in a sixty-one-year-old woman's name, and I am not a party to it and I have deliberately not asked.

Ilma has said one thing to me since. In a corridor, in the March, on the way out of the room where she could not name a supplier.

She said, "He's my son."

I said I knew he was.

That is the whole exchange and I think about it about once a month, because it is, as far as I can tell, the entire content of that woman, and because I do not think she believes she did anything at all.

Wade is working. Somebody told me he is at a logistics firm two counties over. I hope that is true and I do not mean that generously; I mean that a man with sixty-one thousand dollars of proven trading in eight months is extremely employable and it would be absurd if he were not.