It would perhaps be tempting to suppose that Don’s arrival upon that intolerably hot September morning was merely one of those coincidences to which we assign no significance except when subsequent events have furnished them with one; but such an interpretation would neglect both the nature of his attachment to the undertaking and that curious economy by which assistance, when it can no longer be purchased, sometimes becomes freely given.

Don appeared that morning without being asked, which was characteristic of him in precisely the wrong way. It was nearly impossible to know whether he would appear when expected, yet equally impossible to assume his absence when he was not. Reliability, I had learned, is not a single human virtue but a collection of them, and Don possessed some in extravagant quantities while appearing to have misplaced others altogether. I had six days left to make one home capable of carrying me away from the other, which I was about to lose.
This particular morning I was grateful for the distinction.

Don was, by any conventional accounting, an unreliable man. He was also beneath my bed in one hundred and five degree heat, installing an electrical system for which I could no longer afford to pay him. I have known considerably more reliable men who would not have done so.
The electrical backboard had reached that awkward stage of construction at which everything becomes heavier than the arithmetic suggests. I had designed it, arranged it, rearranged it, and eventually arrived at a disposition of its components which satisfied both physics and my particular neuroses concerning electricity. There remained only the minor difficulty of putting the fucking thing under the bed; my back had settled the question of who would put it there.