Frank looked up from his work, his phone and devices he was using to monitor the house from his spot in the back seat. I could see his face in the rearview mirror, that face where it seemed like all worries went to be forgotten. “I’m as happy as I’ve ever been,” he said. “I wouldn’t want anything else. I’m not chasing after anything. I’ve got everything I need.”

He was dead two weeks later.

—

I worked at the warehouse, worked and waited. I got up every morning and drove out of town and went to work, drove home at the end of the day and ate and watched TV and went to bed and got up and did the same thing the next day. I was always tired, tired when I woke up, tired when I worked, tired when I went to bed.

“You’re not tired,” Casey said, “you’re depressed.”

Maybe she was right. I talked to her almost every night. She was about the only person I talked with. I saw other people in the warehouse, but always at a distance. I was too busy driving around the huge place, picking up trash, cleaning up mess. I had a strict schedule. Everyone else did too. We were all small, silent cogs in an enormous machine. No one was paying us to talk, or to think. I wasn’t cut out for this life, I thought. I thought it all the time.

“It’s in your blood,” Frank had told me. “It’s in all of us. Or most of us. Us Americans anyway.”

“We’re all crooks,” I said. “Because we’re capitalists.”

We were back in the car, which smelled like Chinese food. We’d been there most of the night. We were working. This was early on in our work together, our life together. There was more joking and teasing, to pass the time. We were getting comfortable together.

Frank laughed. “I guess that’s one way to look at it, but I was thinking farther back. You know England used to ship thieves over here as punishment.”

“I thought that was Australia.”

“They don’t hide their history as well as we do. Starting in 1718, England began shipping convicted criminals over to the colonies. About fifty thousand of them, or about twenty-five percent of the population.”

“My blood doesn’t go back that far,” I said.