fund there would have been an explanation he could hold in his hand. A bad decision, a bad summer. People made bad decisions. He had written up claims for people who had put new kitchens on credit cards the week before their basements flooded. He knew what that looked like.
Twenty thousand dollars that had not come from anywhere looked like something else.
He thought about a second credit card. He thought about a loan, one of the ones advertised on billboards along Kellogg, the faces of smiling families and the fine print about interest he could not imagine. He thought about whether you could take out a personal loan against a dental hygienist's salary without your husband ever seeing the statement, and he knew that you could, that anybody could do almost anything on paper if they wanted to, and that the reason he did not know whether his wife had was that it had not occurred to him in three years of marriage that he would need to.
He called the office and told Rick he was going to do the afternoon claim tomorrow. Rick said that was fine, the Mulvane people weren't going anywhere, their roof had been leaking since Labor Day and they'd gotten used to the bucket. Then Barrett drove home in the middle of a weekday, which he never did, and let himself into the empty house.
The kitchen was clean. Leti's kitchen was always clean; she could not go to bed with a dish in the sink, and the first winter they were married he had come down at midnight for a glass of milk and found her scrubbing the stovetop under the hood light with an old toothbrush, and she had looked up at him and said, "I'm a hygienist. It's a sickness," and he had laughed and gone back to bed and never thought about it again. He stood in the clean kitchen. On the counter by the coffee maker was the basket where the mail went, and it was empty, because Leti went through the mail every evening and threw out what didn't matter and filed what did in the accordion folder in the hall closet.
He did not open the accordion folder. He told himself afterward that this mattered, though he was never sure it did. He stood in front of the hall closet with his hand on the knob and did not open it. Then he went out to the garage, where Leti's Corolla was not, because Leti was at work, and he stood beside the empty half of the garage and looked at the recycling bin.