Taking it as she had intended to take it, she looked at the check. I suppose she got scared now the check was actually in her hand. I suppose she thought she might be lying her mother into a real tumor. Things like that happened. If only I weren’t in my socks. If only my pants didn’t hang so.

She handed me back the check.

“No,” she said.

“No what?”

“Nothing’s the matter with my mother.”

“What?”

“Oh, shit,” she said. “Do I have to put it on the teletype? There isn’t any tumor.”

I stared at her.

She got up from the chair. She looked angrily at the floor.

“Where did I put my goddam shoes?” she said.

But, though I was bewildered, though I held the check foolishly in my hand, though she went through the business of finding her shoes and got furiously into them, I was sure something was the matter. I went to her. I put my hands on her arms. I am, as Michael might say, an arm-taker.

I said: “Now stop it. You do need money. If nothing’s wrong with your mother, what is wrong?”

She wouldn’t answer. She simply looked furious about something.

“Now, Aurora. What is it?”

I was being firm. I was being, again, the patient one. Her knowledgeable senior.

She said, reluctantly (I was extracting it against her will, I was forcing it from her): “It’s my goddam school tuition. I need a hundred and fifty dollars for my next semester and I don’t have it.”

I think I looked reproachful.

“And your mother doesn’t really have a tumor?”

“My mother,” she said, angrily, “doesn’t even have a four-card flush.”

“Baby, you didn’t have to.”

“What?”

“Lie to me.”

“Oh, shit. School. It sounded so idiotic.”

“And that’s what you’ve been so miserable about?”

“I hate needing money.”

“We all hate needing money.”

Business now of looking relieved. Tender smile. A squeeze of her unhappy hand. The things I do with a woman never vary. I see myself, down the years, in the gathering of time, squeezing unhappy hands. I hear my solicitous voice.

“Baby, a hundred and fifty dollars isn’t one of the great calamities.”

Actually, of course, what she was thinking at the moment, as she confessed later, was that at the first chance she got she was going to kill Michael. She was going to cut off his bizarre nuts, she was going to fry them in Crisco. And, of course, my pants sagging. She thought any minute she’d giggle. My pants were going to fall, she thought, she’d giggle, and then somebody would throw a custard pie. It absolutely figured.

“The check is already made out, darling,” I said. “Take it.”

And I was, again, pressing the inscribed thing on her.

“Asher, I don’t really want it,” she said.

“Keep quiet.”

“Honestly. I’ll get the money. Somewhere.”

The “somewhere” was brave and indefinite. It simply made me fold the check, open her purse, and put the slip of paper away inside it.