Maybe it was the twenty-dollar bills in the envelope, the impending return they represented, or maybe the image of his father broken and remorseful, his weakness merely pitiable, not embarrassing, but the letter didn’t anger Clem. It made him very anxious. The feeling was like something from a dream, a dreamer’s panicked sense of needing to be somewhere else, of being late for an important exam, of having forgotten he had a train to catch. How absurd that he’d thought he needed to prove himself stronger than his father. He’d been fighting a battle long since won, in an irrelevant sector of the dreamworld.