He’d had something useful in the truck the night before. Of all things, this time it was an old board game. Inspiration wasn’t a familiar feeling to Roy, but it had come and goosed him in a moment of need and he’d gone scrabbling around next to the fifty-five-gallon fish tank he kept near the bumper end that held his clothes and important papers.

Because he’d had it, he’d been able to avert a fight between two men he barely knew. In reward and celebration, they’d given him a number of beers that he’d lost count of.

And for a whole night there had been laughter and no fear. Roy had slept a full nine hours on sofa cushions instead of waiting out the darkness in a restless doze on a cold, cracked vinyl bucket seat. He’d had a pillow and everything.

He’d tagged along with Mikey and Byron and the other guys from the worksite, a corporate landscaping project so vast that Roy could reasonably hope for cash under the table for weeks. The guys were headed out for a beer or five to close out the workday. He hadn’t exactly been invited, but he wasn’t expressly uninvited either. He’d been feeling the blues coming on. He couldn’t afford to waste money on bar beer, but he was afraid to be alone.

Roy had been scraping by for the last few years with day work and side jobs and the occasional extra $20 or $50 from John. He’d leave a quarter where John had told him to—in front of John’s car by his office, or on the curb where he parked at the YMCA—the old signal between them. It was a pointed joke. Painful, but Roy was a good sport. He wasn’t mad. He wasn’t.

Shortly after they’d met, he’d won a coin toss for the chance to do some side work for John, to earn some extra money. That moment was so far away it felt like a different life. A different Roy. He’d aged a lot in five years.

And it had all gone completely old-dynamite wrong, as Roy’s mom used to say.

Roy and John were bound up together in the long fuse of that old dynamite.

John figured that Roy owed him and reminded him of it often. You lost big when you won that coin toss, Roy. And isn’t that just like you? Lose every time, even when you win.

Roy did owe John, from one way of looking at it. The woman who died was Roy’s fault. It was an accident, but it didn’t change the truth of what Roy had done.