After the deck, for the rest of the grunt work, Jonathan flipped a coin between the two broke-ass fools who most needed a job, cheating the spin to let Roy win the jumping chance to ask How high? Out of the two likely candidates, Roy was the weakest, and therefore the best.

Jonathan set him on various errands and projects and exorcised his irritation on Roy’s cringing back at every fumble and misstep.

The leaching worked. Jonathan felt better. He acted more friendly with other people. He slept more deeply. He got things done. When diagrammed out, it was the upstanding thing to do. Everyone whom Jonathan encountered benefited from his heaping a little extra shit on a guy who didn’t notice the difference.

Roy, like John’s father, also had a weakness for junk. His truck was full to blackout at the windows with it. Jonathan had called him over for the sneezy, gritty chore of clearing out the old man’s garage. The endless heaps of everything had Roy as distracted as a toddler in a toy store.

Jonathan was hot and exasperated until the discovery of a box bowing at the sides with old magazines, loose art prints in plastic sleeves, and a painting sticking up from the rest—a mill with a waterwheel next to a river, a bridge, a tall tower off on its own in the middle distance. Boring.

When Jonathan pulled the panel out and saw the faint inscription, R. 16, something illegible, then an 8, brushed in at the right corner, the painting just sitting there in a box in his father’s garage, propped up among the ridiculous crap and the marginally useful crap, he doubted it at first. But he’d seen enough old junk to recognize time. And that looked like an awful lot of time.

He’d sharpened his sneer to shoo away Roy, who was peering over Jonathan’s shoulder, cooing over the stack of papers and art prints as if it were sweet.

Do you need something to read, Roy? Can you even read? Take this shit if it interests you so much.

Jonathan had topped off the box with a pair of dry-rotted snowshoes that Roy had been eyeing, and shoved him out the door to be alone with this possible treasure.

It had been overcast and the daylight hadn’t gained much of a reach through the rolled-up metal door. Jonathan squinted to make the most of the weak, gray glow as he studied his find. Then he believed what he saw: that the first two digits of that number would be worth a lot. But to whom?