Sixty-five hundred for the car, if that was what it cost. Efraín Esquivel was a man Barrett had met exactly once, at Itzel's eighth-grade promotion, a tall man with an expensive watch who had arrived late and left early and shaken Barrett's hand without looking at him. Leti said that man had paid sixty-five hundred dollars.
An iPad. A bicycle. Tutoring. A ring.
His wife breathed beside him, slow and even. She slept on her side, facing the wall, with one hand under her cheek, and she always had; on the night of their wedding she had told him, laughing, that she had not slept facing a door in fifteen years and he should not take it personally. He had not. He had thought it was one of her small strange rules, like the way she kept two hundred dollars folded in the toe of a winter boot in the back of the closet, or the way she never let the gas tank in her car drop below half.
Twenty thousand dollars since April. And Bryony asked for one band trip.
He got up at two and went downstairs and drank a glass of water standing in the dark kitchen, and he looked at the refrigerator, where the calendar hung from a magnet shaped like a molar, a gift from the dental practice where Leti cleaned teeth. Each person in the house had a color. Leti was green and he was blue and Itzel was orange, and there was a lot of orange, tournaments and tutoring and a college visit to Emporia State circled twice. Amparo was purple: pottery Thursdays, a birthday party at a friend's. Bryony was red. Bryony had jazz band at 6:15 on Tuesdays, before school, and in the square for November first, in her careful small capitals, she had written ORLANDO DEPOSIT, and then at some later date someone had drawn a single line through it. Not scribbled out. Just struck through, neatly, so that you could still read it.
He knew it was Bryony who had drawn that line. He did not know how he knew. He stood there with the glass sweating in his hand and he understood that he would not sleep any more that night.
On Monday he had a hail claim in Derby, a two-story colonial on a cul-de-sac where every roof had taken the same storm on the same September afternoon, and he spent the first hour of it on his hands and knees on the north slope with a piece of yellow chalk, drawing circles.
The homeowner was a retired air traffic controller named Mr. Steinkamp who stood in his driveway in a windbreaker with his hands in his pockets and did not call up a single question, which Barrett appreciated. Rick Gerlach from the Heartland office had told him about