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His face doesn’t move, but he’s turning that over. I stand in his kitchen with my bag still on my shoulder and let him think.

“What did it cost?” he says.

“None of it went on your balance.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

“It’s the answer I’ve got.”

“You keep saying that.” He puts the laptop on the cushion. “Every time. You give me half an answer.”

“All right.”

“Eleven weeks,” he says. “In eleven weeks you’ve moved my brother out of his house at eight in the morning. You paid six men out of a bag on his counter, got a man out of my lobby, and my balance hasn’t moved one dollar in any direction except down. I can’t find a single line item for any of it anywhere in my own accounts, and I’ve looked.”

The refrigerator cycles on.

“Have you?” I say.

“Every statement since November. Twice.” He’s not raising his voice. He hasn’t raised it once in eleven weeks. I don’t think he can. “There’s a moving company that isn’t there. Payroll for six men that isn’t there. A lock and chain on a gate. Somebody bought them at a hardware store. None of it is in the balance.”

I put my bag down.

There’s a sentence available here that ends this. A true one. Four words long. I’ve never told a man on an account a truth like that in nine years. Once I do, everything will become a negotiation I don’t control.

“Go to bed, Kieran,” I say. “You’re in Vancouver Sunday.”

I leave before he can say anything else.

In the car, I take the moving invoice out of my inside pocket and unfold it under the dome light.

Four thousand one hundred and sixty dollars for the van, the two men, and the long haul north. The six months on the county road house went out separately on Sunday night, paid in full with the card ending in the four digits I’ve had since I was thirty-one. And across the top, printed by a machine in a driveway on Alder Street on Monday morning, in capitals, with the address of my own apartment underneath it:

MAREK BRANDT.

The invoice exists in the movers’ system and my bank’s. My name is printed across the paper in my hand. I paid four thousand one hundred and sixty dollars to move a debtor’s brother beyond Vera’s reach.

I read it three times.

Then I fold it back into thirds and put it in my inside pocket, on the left, against my chest, where I’ve kept nothing since I stopped carrying my father’s watch. I sit in a parked car outside an eleven-story building on Weyburn with the dome light on and the engine off until the light goes off by itself.

9

Two hours north, the snow is still real snow. In the city it goes to gray slush by ten in the morning. Up here it sits in the fields in one piece, white to the tree line. The county road is sand, salt, and frost. The truck rides it badly.

Fin is on the roof of a rented house at eleven o’clock on a Friday morning in February with a nail gun, and he waves at me with the wrong hand, which is how I find out about the splint before I’m out of the truck.

“Off Tuesday!” He holds it up, flexes it. It doesn’t fully close. “Look at that. Look at it! Surgeon says that’s as good as it gets at this point, but the rest will come back.”

“Get off the roof.”

“There’s a leak over the back bedroom.”

“It’s not your house.”

“It’s my bedroom.” He comes down the ladder anyway, one rung at a time, grinning the whole way. He hasn’t looked like this since before the summer.

Inside, the house is what a furnished rental two hours from anywhere is: brown couch, a table with four unmatched chairs, a woodstove somebody has been feeding badly. His photographs are on the mantel, the windowsill, the top of the television. The one of the two of us on the outdoor rink is in the middle.