My poor dear, I will help you escape. If you will let me.

7.

And now I am at an impasse. For if I continue to send Keisha gifts of cash and her husband discovers them, he will punish her, perhaps more savagely than he has done. My impression is that Keisha is too honest to dissemble, the kind of woman who feels guilt over small matters even when she is guiltless.

A wild thought comes to me and keeps me awake late into the night—I could arrange for Keisha to receive a large sum of money, which would free her from the brute. (Thousands of dollars?) (One million dollars?)

For much of a day the possibility consoles me. Trying to imagine what such a gift could mean to a woman like Keisha, who is obliged not only to work at a minimal wage in McGuire’s dingy market but who has just recently completed a cycle of brutal medical treatment.

A trust fund, perhaps. Monthly allotments. Some (legal) way of providing the woman with financial independence, at least.

Thinking—would a woman like Keisha, no doubt a longtime inhabitant of Herrontown, Pennsylvania, with probably no more than a high school diploma, if even that, be capable of breaking ties to an oppressive husband? Asserting her own dependence at her age?

One million dollars, gifted to a grocery store clerk! It could not be kept secret, the spouse would know. The family would know. Relatives. Neighbors. Media would sweep upon the frail woman greedily. Total strangers would seek her out, hoping to exploit her.

As I work out how to proceed, I have to concede that something like curiosity is driving me now. Each morning, instead of lying near comatose in bed, scarcely able to open my eyes, I wake eagerly, wondering what will happen next: what I will direct, that will happen next. For the cashier’s (ordinary) life is in my control, if I wish it.

“How exciting life is! I’d never realized”—this bizarre remark is uttered to my tax accountant, Gopnik, who stares at me as if I have suddenly begun speaking in a foreign language.

Rare that I say anything to Gopnik beyond a minimum of words. Tax statements, bank statements, stacks of canceled checks and receipts. In Gopnik’s presence a robotic efficiency courses through me. Even my murmured words of greeting and farewell are the utterances of a robot.

But now Gopnik is nonplussed. Smiles inanely, as if to agree with me, however bizarre and improbable the sentiment—How exciting life is … in Herrontown, PA.

Gopnik doesn’t live in Herrontown. Gopnik lives in Doylestown, forty minutes away.

Inquiring of the accountant how it might be arranged—a “trust,” established by an unknown benefactor, with interest paid in (monthly?) allotments to an individual who would be given minimum information about the arrangement.

“Well. It could be done”—Gopnik’s reply is notably lacking in enthusiasm.

Why would it be done, who would be the beneficiary of such a (desperate?) transaction, Gopnik knows better than to inquire of his reticent client.