Using the open passenger door as a makeshift dressing screen, he steps out of his jeans and into the suit pants. Smears the dust and grime off the boots with the wadded-up T-shirt, then tugs the hem over the laces. All the while he keeps glancing through the windshield, willing the dump truck and the fat man to reappear. Again, one ignition click—11:54. He gives up knotting the tie, yanking at it like a backward noose in frustration. He needs a pen and paper. There is no pen and paper but—back on the bench seat—a red crayon. He holds his breath, steadies his grip, then prints his name and the number of his dead cell phone onto the paper liner of the McDonald’s ice cream cone.

“Órale. Que guapo, güey.”

“Here.” He hands Jorge the paper liner. The gesticulations his hands are flapping and folding into are ridiculous but he doesn’t care. He needs Jorge to understand.

“Yo necesito to go—va, I mean, yo voy, right now. Ahora, okay? But so when the fat man pays you, you take mi dinero, too, and then call me at this número. Mi número, got it? Fifty dolares. No, wait, after the gas, it’s forty. Forty. Cuatro-cero, para mi, okay? Comprende?”

Jorge nods. Shakes Henry’s hand, wishes him buena suerte, tells him que vaya con dios. Henry can’t help looking from the good eye to the socket. In that fleshy recess he detects a definitive loneliness, and so fears this could very well be good-bye for good.

Henry is driving recklessly. Blasting past and swerving around other vehicles, all of which seem to be occupying the road for no reason other than to delay and aggravate him, until he comes screeching to a stop outside a CVS.

Henry storms through the entrance and startles a dozing rent-a-cop. All the products and displays smear as he power walks in search of the deodorant aisle, still fiddling and failing with the necktie. He pivots, now facing a multicolored wall, each of its hundreds of bricks promising a unique scent or odor-combating technology, none of which are on sale. He reaches for the Old Spice, full price $4.97. Given what’s left in his front pocket, this is extravagant. Still has to buy dinner for Junior, and, after this, there’s no way he’ll be able to purchase some sort of penance for this morning’s outburst. Plus, if he wants to get that call from Jorge for the forty and later hear back from the interviewer, he’s got to load the five dollar minimum onto his prepay phone—yet another expense he’s been putting off, because who the hell is trying to get ahold of him, who the fuck is he supposed to be reaching out to?