He arrived at thirty-six with one duffel bag, because everything else had been sold or repossessed or left in a storage unit he stopped paying for. His mother had kept the room exactly. The race-car bed was still there, and the glow-in-the-dark stars, and she had set fresh towels on the dresser that morning, folded in thirds the way she folded them in 1998.

He said it was just temporary four times before he got his shoes off. She said dinner was at six and did not ask a single question, then or in the weeks after. He slept eleven hours that first night, with his feet hanging off the end of the bed, in the only room left on earth where nobody was owed anything.