Before Henry can fasten the towel around his waist, he’s already thrown it over the puddle of vomit the boy has deposited onto the carpet. Squatting naked and dripping at the bedside, he swabs the towel on the floor with one hand while matting Junior’s burning face with the other. He tells the boy everything’s okay, because his pa is right here.

Henry’s knees sink into the mush beneath the towel, as he embraces the boy with both arms. Junior’s wiry frame is racked with tremors, so Henry squeezes tighter and tighter, as if he could still the rattles with pressure, a full-body stranglehold. It doesn’t work. The boy keeps shivering. An icy fear plunges into Henry’s stomach, and now he can hardly tell where Junior’s tremors end and his own begin. They are a circuit of trembling, an echo chamber of unease, and as Henry squeezes tighter still, a thought rustles then lifts, spiraling louder and clearer with each lap it makes through his skull. If fatherhood has taught him anything at all, it is helplessness.

$300.00

“Here’s your half.”

Henry took his cut from Al, spread the bills into a mini–hand fan to better count them: six crisp fifties. Before folding them into his pocket, he paused. Something off. He put the fan between his face and the sharp morning sun, casting the cash translucent. Watermark, security thread, color-shifting ink. Not that he’d actually suspected they were counterfeits, but still.

“They already paid you?” Henry asked.

“Rich people, dude.” Al reached for the chainsaw in the truck bed, but was barricaded by his own belly pressing into the side panel. He gave up. “Imagine having enough money to trust people.”

“Must be nice.” Henry stepped onto the rear tire and up into the bed. First he passed over the chainsaw, then eased a steel wheelbarrow down to Al, who let it thunder onto the pavement. Up that hill, in one of those mansions, there must have been at least one irritated neighbor, but nobody came out or shouted, and so Henry lobbed a shovel, two metal rakes, and a pair of loppers into the barrow, not even bothering to try to cushion their awful clanks and squeals.

He had to hand it to Al. There was no denying the chubby junkie’s entrepreneurial spirit. Unlike the other skinnies, he didn’t treat money as a mere means to a fix. All the scheming, haggling, and hustling, for Al, were ends in themselves. Always had been, from his middle school days of hawking his older brother’s hand-me-down Coogis and dad’s porno mags to spritzing water onto buds or cutting crushed acetaminophen into every dime bag he sold, he couldn’t help himself whenever there was a buck to be made.