The phone rings for a fourth time but my questions have him too riled up. He doesn’t so much as glance down at the screen.

“Do you know what happens when your bank account is frozen? You can’t pay your bills, that’s what. You learn real quick how to space them out, to borrow money from the mortgage in order to pay the electric bill, until your bank tries to take back the house, so you swipe the phone money to pay the mortgage. My point is, that shit catches up with you eventually. They come after you then. Your house, your cars, your assets. They take everything, and they don’t stop until the only thing you’ve got left to your name is the clothes on your back and a credit score that’ll get you laughed out of every bank. They even took my daughter’s medical vest. They took her oxygen tank!”

“That doesn’t seem right.”

“Oh, you think?” He makes a sound, a kind of angry bark. “It’s evil is what it is. She needs those things to breathe. When I threatened to go to the police, they replaced it with an old piece of shit machine that weighs a ton, not caring that carrying anything over a pound gets her winded. You tell me how that’s fair.”

“It’s not. You’re right to be angry.”

The man seems surprised by my answer. He frowns, matching my gaze with his glare, while the phone rings one last time before flipping to voice mail.

“Damn straight I’m right. And don’t even get me started on insurance. It doesn’t get much more preexisting than cystic fibrosis, which means when we were forced to switch, none of the good ones would touch us, and the ones we could afford don’t cover half the therapies she needs to survive. Those companies make it so complicated you give up. Throw your hands up in despair. Do you know what the out-of-pocket costs are, even with decent insurance? Do you?”

“No, but I’m guessing it’s a lot,” I say, but this is where my mind is traveling: down the stairs and out the front door and down the hill and across the road, to the painted brick home across the street. Tanya Lloyd’s house. To those stories she’s always sharing of her poor, beloved niece, the one with cystic fibrosis. The one Tanya is organizing a fundraiser for, the one she just asked me to donate my time and talent to, the one who desperately needs the money to pay for the lung transplant that is this girl’s last hope.