And so it goes. Aimee thinks that Noah is loath to make phone calls, to try to find some higher-ups to stop the hospital bills long gone to collections. She is perhaps right, he at least admits to himself, at night when he sits on the couch in his pajamas alone. It’s true that Noah, in his own twisted way, is only prolonging things only trying to at least keep that small shred of connection to the old man open. His flamboyant efforts to keep the collectors at bay aren’t real at all, but are only a pathetic cry for help, an invitation for them to send more and more and more.

So it is that one August day Noah, after a long dry afternoon watering a scraggly field of corn that has not and never will produce fruit, comes into the house and asks Aimee to make her phone call. And she does, and calls her friend Rachel, whose father is close friends with Congressman Barnes, and afterwards when Noah calls the hospital asking after next bill he is told that everything is taken care of, there is no balance owed, and he can please go on with his life now.

At least he tries to do that. But still each night he comes in from his studio (sometimes a little drunk) and sits alone in the basement, listening to the creak of ghosts moving through the house, and wondering what his wife is thinking of in the upstairs bedroom, his old bedroom, while he waits alone downstairs among the dead man’s things.