Second shift at an auto-parts warehouse, $23.10 an hour, thirty-four years old. The judgment came out of a signature loan he had taken in one sitting, on his phone, in a parking lot. Payroll processed it without comment. The clerk who handed over the stub wore a lanyard full of pins and wished him a good weekend.

Twenty-five percent, off the top, before anything he recognized as his. He did the arithmetic in the break room with a golf pencil and got a number that did not cover the car and the storage unit both. He gave up the storage unit. Everything in it belonged to a version of him who had believed the money was temporary.