Baby is 100.2 now btw
LORENZ
He sat down in the one good chair and typed with his thumb.
Not in. Long story. Money is safe. In the office safe. I am safe. Tell you tomorrow. Glad baby is better. Go to sleep.
The reply came back in under ten seconds.
WHAT
He put the phone face down on the desk and sat in the chair for a while, looking at the index card on the safe door, before he got up and went into the kitchen and threw away eight third pans of mise en place one by one into the trash, and washed every pan, and dried them, and stacked them on the shelf, and peeled each green day dot off with his thumbnail.
He got home at a quarter past four. Analyn was still at work; she would be home at seven-thirty. Paolo was asleep in his room with the door open and the desk lamp on and a library book about the Titanic open face down on his chest. Lorenz turned off the lamp and put the book on the desk with a receipt in it to keep the page, and stood for a while in the door of the room, the way he used to stand in the door of the galley at night after everything was cleaned and stowed, before he turned off the light, just looking at it, everything in its place, everything secured for weather.
At nine o'clock he was standing at the counter of the padala shop on Lima Road, between a nail salon and a Cricket Wireless, in the same clothes, unshaven. Behind the counter was Mrs. Dizon, who was from Batangas and had sent his money home for six years and knew him by his first name and his mother's name and the name of his mother's dialysis center, and she took the envelope from him and opened it and began counting the twenties and then stopped, and held up the envelope, and looked at the gray thumbprint across NANAY, and at him.
"Anong nangyari?" she said. What happened?