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“How much?” I said.

“A hundred dollars,” he said.

“For what?” I said.

“You know,” he said, but neither of us did.

Sometimes sex is a thing we do for those in need out of compassion, or for ourselves, out of curiosity. I unbuttoned another button. The lawyer, who in all this time had not…

“It happened again,” Ken said. “The koi.” If only he had left for work on time, he thought, he would not be responsible, he would not have met the depths of his own impotent inaction so early in the day.

“Why didn’t you stop him?” she asked, her tone flinty. Ken, fundamentally a soft man, deflat…

It wasn’t clear, when Jeff and Terri announced that they had built a koi pond, whether they had known that Ruth had been so long suffering for one. The two couples were sitting in Jeff and Terri’s living room on a stiff modern sofa that lacked arms. They never stayed at Jeff and Terri’s long enough…

That summer, home for a funeral, I drove to his house and knocked on his door.

Old buddy, he said when he answered. I can’t believe it’s you.

Believe it, I said.

Why don’t you come in? he said.

I don’t want to come in, I said. You know why I’m here.

All right, he said, trying to rema…

I promptly cashed the check and booked a plane ticket to Amsterdam for the holidays. Out of the country for the first time in my life, loose on the Continent with a Eurail pass, I spent every dime of that dirty money as frivolously as I could — champagne in Paris, dope in Amsterdam, ephemeral pleas…