Page 73 of Puck Me Like You Own Me

“Buy the barn,” I say.

“It’s not the barn,” he says. “It’s June.”

He rinses the mug and puts it upside down on the rack.

“You’d have to come out,” he says to the rack. “It’s two hours. There’s no reason for a financial manager to be up there in June, is there? There’s nothing to file.”

“No.”

“So you’d have to come out for no reason.”

“Yes,” I say. “That’s what I’d be doing.”

He nods at the window and asks me whether there’s any of that bread left.

Vera calls at ten past nine on Monday morning.

“Come in this afternoon.”

The car isn’t a service this time. Roth is driving it.

He doesn’t say anything on the way or in the elevator. He holds the third-floor door open with his arm and lets me go first.

Vera is at her desk with the glasses on.

“Sit down.”

The desk is covered with papers.

They’re laid out in three rows across the entire desk, printed and squared at the edges, in date order left to right and top to bottom—retirement account, savings, the operating account of Brandt Financial, a dealer’s bill of sale for a car, a moving company invoice for four thousand one hundred and sixty dollars with my own name across the top.

Twenty years ago, a man showed me an envelope in a corridor outside a rink, and nobody in that building picked up a telephone for me.

Nineteen weeks ago, I sat at a kitchen table on Weyburn at one in the morning with four years of another man’s statements laid out in date order and watched him come through his own door and not react at all.

I sit down in the chair.

She takes the glasses off, folds them, and sets them square on top of the moving invoice. I sit with my hands on my knees in a room kept at seventy-four degrees and wait for her to begin.

19

Tuesday, he doesn’t come.

That’s not an event. He has a practice, four clients, and an office above an insurance broker with a sewing-machine repair shop under it, and there’s no rule anywhere that says a man has to be in my kitchen at six.

I text him at nine. Stock’s still in the fridge.

It goes to delivered and stays there.

Wednesday, I get up at five because the hip has me up. I do forty minutes on the bike in the empty room at the arena with the lights half on. I check my phone twice in those forty minutes.

Nothing.

I call him at noon, and it rings all the way out. I call him at four, same result. At half past nine, I put my coat on and drive to the port district. I stand on the sidewalk below his steps, looking up at a window with a wall four feet in front of it. There’s no light on. The fish-and-chips place on the corner is busy. I stay long enough for one of the men outside to ask, “You okay, man?”

I say yes and get back in the truck.

I don’t go up and knock.