He went in. He kissed his wife on the cheek and she leaned into it the half inch she always did and said, "How was Winifred," and he said, "Fine, she sends her love," which was a lie his mother had never once asked him to tell and which he had told every Sunday for three years. Amparo showed him the mug. Itzel came down in her knee pads, which she wore around the house the way some girls wore slippers, and stole a piece of the cheese he had just sliced for himself and said, "Thank you, sir," and went back up. Upstairs a door closed. It was Bryony's. He knew the sound of each door in that house the way he knew the sound of each of his own knuckles.
That night he lay beside Leti in the dark and did arithmetic.
He was a property claims adjuster for Heartland Mutual, and had been for nineteen years, and the work of his life, when you came down to it, was walking onto someone's roof after a storm with a piece of sidewalk chalk in his pocket and circling every place the hail had struck. You did a ten-by-ten test square on each slope. You counted the hits. You did not count the scuffs or the blistering or the old granule loss that had been there since 2011; you counted the bruises, the soft places where the mat had cracked under the shingle when you pressed your thumb into it. Eight hits in a square on a three-tab roof and you could write the slope. Fewer than that and you wrote repair. People stood in their yards with their arms crossed and watched you do it and you learned to feel their eyes on your back, wanting the number to be larger. He was good at it. He was patient and he was fair and he did not let anybody talk him into counting what wasn't there.
He lay in the dark and he counted.
Forty-two hundred for the volleyball. He had known it was club, but he had not thought of club as a number. Itzel had made Prairie Fire's top seventeens team in the spring, after two years of playing for the high school and a summer camp at Wichita State, and Leti had said only that it was a big commitment and Itzel was so happy, and he had driven her to practice twice when Leti was stuck at work, a warehouse gym out past the airport with eight courts and a hundred girls and the sound of a hundred volleyballs hitting a hundred forearms like a hailstorm on a metal roof. He had not asked who was paying.