He let about eleven minutes go past, looking for a moment when fewer people were listening — and there was never going to be one in that house on that afternoon, and he must have known it by about the fourth minute, and he stayed anyway.
Which means it could not wait another week. That is the thing I worked out in a hospital car park eleven weeks later and not before.
Then he said it.
« I need to borrow a thousand dollars. »
He had rehearsed that sentence. You could hear it.
It came out in one piece, with the number sitting in the middle of it, the way a line does when a man has been saying it to himself in a car for four miles.
And my wife did not let him finish.
She was across the room by the sink, about eleven feet away, with a serving dish in her hands.
She said it flatly. Not shouted. Said in the voice you use about parking.
« Tell him to get another job. »
