I gave him a look.

“C’mon. Easiest cash I’ll ever make.”

I went by. His name was Jeb. I brought my passport because the photo was better. He seemed bizarrely impressed by the passport, more impressed than a guy with a good haircut and a prefaded T-shirt should have been. For no good reason he showed me his license. His full name was Jebediah. The photo must have been taken when he was sixteen. He looked like hope itself. He counted out five twenties for Wes.

“I don’t know why you’re smiling when I’m getting all the cheddar,” Wes said.

“I thought you grew up under a rock, man. I thought you grew up out of the earth like a mushroom.”

After I left, Jeb asked my brother if he could ask me out.

We went to a candy factory out of town on a hill—everything was on a hill or nestled in a valley there—on a Thursday afternoon. Three old ladies in plastic caps gave us a tour and we ate warm dark chocolate nonpareils and soft peanut butter cups from a brown bag on some playground swings. All the facts of my childhood enthralled him not because they had happened to me but because they had happened to Wes. Wes had put a bit of a spell on him. To him, Wes had crawled out from under his rock and appeared at the bar with tarred teeth and BO and riffing on everything from Hume to Hendricks, gathering the young and the old, the honest and the corrupt, the dead broke and the slumming elite. Jeb had grown up wealthy in Connecticut. He said his nickname prevented people from seeing the Jew in him. His brother Ezra had had a different and more difficult childhood. Jeb had had plenty of exposure to Wasps, but he’d never met one like Wes who’d repented, recanted, who said when pressed that he grew up in Lynn, not Marblehead, who would never admit to tennis trophies or snorkeling in Barbados.