In the late 1890s, his teenage great-grandfather, still new to the country, crossed it on the promise of gold, and found enough to make his start. He panned one of the bigger nuggets discovered in Crow Creek – big enough that no-one within a day’s ride had the money to buy it from him. He sold it to the richest man in town, James Girdwood, for every dollar in the merchant’s safe that day, plus goods now forgotten, plus Girdwood’s own tablecloth, made of fine Belfast linen. So the story goes, and it may well be true. Wade is the current custodian of the tablecloth. It comes out once a year, at Thanksgiving, and it covers four trestle tables lined up in a row. More than twenty of us sit there with our elbows on it. That’s Wade’s America, that moment.

He wants McCain to be alive, and president – not Trump. He voted Republican in 2008 and 2012, but couldn’t bring himself to vote at all in 2016. Two kinds of awful, is how he saw it.

McCord Realty looks like a converted Pizza Hut with fresh pale-grey siding. It sits becalmed in an ocean-sized carpark covered in pale asphalt, with darker seams where cracks have been sealed and caramel stains marking evaporated puddles. There are five cars outside. At least two of them belong to staff. Most agents, Rob included, are likely out showing properties. His black Lincoln Navigator, a luxury SUV worth more than some real estate, is nowhere to be seen. I will not be on the end of one of his well-practised handshakes when I walk inside.

After forty minutes in the van, my knee needs loosening. I put it through its paces, eat some more bagel. I google the Brutus coin that Ellen Baker mentioned and there are photos of it, his face on one side, two daggers and a hat on the other, with ‘EID MAR’ below them. A dagger each for Brutus and Cassius, the hat the pileus of a man newly set free. No doubting the symbolic intent. I studied the play at school but had no idea there were tangible pieces of the story in the world, coins struck in Crete or Greece as Brutus dreamed of taking Rome. The only coin to celebrate a murder.

I track down Ellen and Walter’s website, which looks as if it was designed in the nineties and got stuck there. The most recent blog post was nine months ago, and there is no mention of Walter’s death. The section on framed banknotes sorts from cheapest to most expensive. Most are one to two hundred dollars, but there’s a Massachusetts treasury bill from 1782 for four hundred dollars and, for five hundred dollars and with a lengthy block of explanatory text, a note that looks like the French one Ellen showed me, but in British currency and printed in Connaught, Ireland, in 1798.