“No amount of money is worth a coronary, Harry.”

“I hear you, believe me.”

On his downhill walk home that night, Bill thinks about Harry’s decision in the language used by men in suits: a downsizing of fifty percent in personnel on the hours Helen and Darlene work, coupled with more work (i.e. an “increase in productivity”) from him during the hours he would now work with Helen. He could easily put that kind of data into a memo to a vice-president, with the usual assurances that quality of output would be maintained. Princes were crowned when they came up with those kinds of numbers.

He thinks about Helen’s motivation. Did she talk to Harry about Darlene to protect herself, in case Harry spotted a shortage on the cash register tape? Harry was very lax on tallies of that kind. Or was Helen simply honest? Or cunning beyond belief? Or had Helen seen a way to save Bill’s job? If Harry had discovered the shortages himself, which he hadn’t, but if he had — he might have thought it was Bill’s doing — Bill being the newest person to handle money in the shop.

Darlene, he knows, will blame him for her dismissal, especially if Harry ducks the stealing issue and just tells her he has to let someone go to stay in business, which is more than likely what Harry will do; he won’t fire her for cause, which would make her ineligible for unemployment insurance.

The night is on the village like a freshly printed series of photographs, each streetlight produces uncountable gradations of black and white, while from the windows of the houses television sets pulse out smudged rainbows.

Bill has an image of Darlene: her habit of counting out change to a customer and then stopping while the customer, with hand out, waits while Darlene looks out the window and hitches her bra strap. He then has thoughts of the therapist, twenty years ago, who asked him at the start of one of their first hours together, “What is the joy in your life?” He had been dumbfounded by the question, without a clue as to what she was asking. She knew, didn’t she, that he was in the midst of a divorce? This was the end of his life, premature but definite. Now remarried, the question is still with him and so is the presence of the therapist — the conspiracy of non-lovers meeting at eight o’clock in the morning to talk of nothing but love — the compassion in her face, and the boots she wore, knee high, far from clinically correct, and her legs and knees when she did not wear boots.

The night is on the village like a freshly printed series of photographs, each street-light produces uncountable gradations of black and white, while from the windows of the houses television sets pulse out smudged rainbows. From here he can see The George Washington Bridge, its lights dancing with promise in front of the glow of Manhattan, as if all the fires of the successful were reflected against the low clouds.

There was a “smarten-up” conversation he overheard once in an elevator: “Look at Jimmy Carter,” a man said. “He was a nice guy and he worked like hell.” He is conscious of time, remembers his days in the army when he prayed he would not win the first hand of poker in the barracks, for fear of the many losing hands that could come later. He passes a doctor’s house, junk mail on the porch floor from an overflowing mailbox. No one has picked the dead-heads from the pink geraniums lining the walk; without a recent rain, they look fatigued, disorganized, leaderless.

He’d be home at the usual time, before twelve-thirty. “Is she awake?” He should have called her, as he often did in the late afternoon. She had never called him at the bakery, and as the weeks went by, he became less and less accepting of her inability to call him there. And he was never to come to an acceptance of that silence.