He stuffed the envelope of cash—most of it in twenties—into the inner pocket of his jacket and got out of the car, stretching out his back as he did. He turned and leaned down to speak to the dog through the open door. “If you see anything suspicious, honk three times,” he told her.

He closed the door without locking it and started up the street. If, for some reason, he never returned, at least someone could rescue the dog without having to break a window.

There was no sidewalk in this neighborhood, so Keegan walked on the street-side of the parked cars, feeling absurdly conspicuous—an obvious interloper here, with a bulge in his coat pocket. But it was almost dark now, and, though the street was bustling with life at the dinner hour, no one was outside where they might see him.

Many of the houses Keegan passed were lit from within, their windows wide open against the heat. Keegan could hear voices and television programs and the clatter of silverware—the soundtrack of a domestic realm Keegan had failed to enter when he’d had the chance. His childless marriage had flamed out after barely two years. And now, a couple of decades later, it was hard to remember ever having lived with someone else. She was up in Salinas, last he’d heard. Remarried with kids. Wife of a broccoli tycoon.

Some long nights, alone in his apartment, Keegan wondered if he’d really missed out on anything. He doubted it. After all, how many happily married men his age could he name? It was even harder to imagine himself cast as a doting father. He’d never had the patience to enjoy the company of children. Just Mrs. Dodd’s singsong voice on the telephone when she was talking to her grandchildren was enough to put him on edge.

It didn’t help any that he had no first-hand memories of his own father, a pipe-fitter who, in photographs at least, looked ill-prepared to take on the world. His was a dour, Edwardian head in the back corner of a few formal family photos. His face, always turned a little too far from the camera, looked like it had been slapped. He’d turned up dead on the rocks beneath the Point Fermin lighthouse when Keegan was barely forming sentences, and he was quickly written out of the script. The only man in Keegan’s childhood was his maternal grandfather, who had little time for anything but citrus grafting. Once his two sons were grown and out of the house, with land of their own, he had no patience for those he came home to, spending his evenings on the porch, where he could keep an eye on the hunched ranks of his orange groves, rippling out over the hilly ground.