Michelle cleared her throat. But nothing, but whatever, she said. The fuck had Al been thinking? Picking Henry up all twisted in the middle of the night, and with merch in the trunk? And plus hadn’t it been Al himself who’d offered to take any and all heat in the first place? Remember, Hen? Only thing Al had asked Henry for was the down payment. Far as she was concerned, anything—any of Henry’s, like, involvement had been a favor. Innocent, like. Apples and bananas, what them two had done, and that weren’t no excuse for him to be facing the same kind of time as Al, no way.

Henry was in a hallway. A linoleum tunnel. One end led back to the main room, then a door, behind which was Al, while the other end must have led outside, homeward. Even when Henry trained his mind’s eye down the hall and past the steel, he couldn’t picture Al. Maybe already gone, already a ghost. “I can’t, Michelle.”

“You better,” she said. “You got too much to lose.”

“Yeah, no.”

“And what Al got, huh? Bad habits, worse breath, and a bust-up Pontiac. This some two-plus-two shit, Hen. Might not be easy, but sure as shit’s simple.”

Michelle and her guillotine logic. One clean chop. She wasn’t wrong, but she wasn’t here either. Would she have been able to see Al behind that door? Henry still had no idea what time it was. Didn’t know how to tabulate the time that had passed, let alone measure for the future. If he couldn’t track seconds or minutes, how could he ever conceive of thirty years? How could he consign either or both of them to a fate so immeasurable? He began tapping then hitting the receiver against his forehead, making a metronome to reacquaint himself with the drum of seconds, to summon Al’s likeness from the still, black pool of his memory. Not so much as a ripple. Just heat. A warmth blossoming above his brow. It went from a sizzle to scalding. Among licks of Michelle’s voice and white-hot flames, in this place where Al hadn’t resurfaced, Junior emerged instead, and so that was that. That was plenty enough.

$6.41

The toothbrush, dangling from the boy’s hand, drips a trail of foamy blots onto the asphalt, marking his path from the Spee-Dee market to the truck. He ignores the door, instead clambers up into the truck bed. Starts sifting through garbage bags until he finds his puffy black winter coat. When he cinches the bag shut, his face raisins. Asks how come Henry’d stolen the iron.