The insurance assessor finally visits. He takes a quick glance at the curbside trash heap, flips through Michael’s photos from the disposable cameras, then spends fifteen minutes opening cupboards and looking under furniture, knocking on freshly painted walls. He punches some numbers into his phone, scribbles a few angry-seeming notes on his clipboard, then cuts Michael a check for only slightly more than what he spent at the hardware store that first day.

“What about the mattresses? And the carpet, it’s destroyed. Did you see what they did to the pool?”

The assessor keeps a straight face, saying, “Market value. You’ve had that carpet for ten years, sir.” He glances at his paperwork. “The mattress, twenty. Have you heard of depreciation, sir?” It’s all Michael can do to not hit him in the nose.

That afternoon they go to visit the Johnstons at their new retirement home, which Michael finds dispiriting despite the cheery paint and big, sunlit windows. He has seen plenty of men age, generations of players go from kids to men to men too old to play (in one interview, Joe had called it “the pressures of age”), but this—the walkers and wheelchairs, the hunched and frail remnants of masculinity—is different. He’s still not entirely forgiven Dave and Betty for leaving the neighborhood, but to see them now, Betty looking as feeble as a twig, Dave’s wobbly hand supporting her elbow as they walk, he can’t find it in him to stay mad.

Michael keeps going to the cage at night. Sometimes Jason is there, always just wrapping up, some nights the place is empty, lit like a stage awaiting his entrance. Hitting does something good for his head, clears it out after he gets so damn hot thinking about what’s happened to their home. Focusing on that small sphere rushing toward him, creaming the thing, sending it sailing into the net, where it stops and hangs for a second, jostling around the mesh fabric before falling—Michael likes that. His hands, burning where the knob of the bat bites the heel of his palm: that feels great. The ritual cools him off before he goes back to Audrey and their friends. With them he has to act like everything is fine, like he isn’t seething mad. Like he isn’t still pissed about how the recession knocked them flat, not angry at how the Lions are trying to force him to retire, not aggrieved at how his kids, all of them over thirty, still can’t find their bootstraps, much less give them a good yank in the upward direction.