Franklin didn’t reply. She would remind him in any case.

“It’s because little Frank and Bonnie love coming here to see them,” she said. “It’s always like,” — she made her voice childish — “‘when are we going to Daddy’s to see Mr. Gills?’”

Mr. Gills was the Bumblebee Cichlid. He shared the tank with three females, a pair of American Flag Fish, a half dozen Black Neon Tetra, and four Boesemani Rainbows with bluish-purple heads and iridescent orange bodies. Mr. Gills was the children’s favorite for the way he changed colors and harassed the other fish when they swam near him.

“But if the tank’s not clean, the fish will die. This place already stinks to high heaven.”

Franklin knew there was not much else in his life that made little Frank and Bonnie want to spend time with him. He didn’t go for cartoons on television, and miniature golf was torture for him. The holes were gaudy and ridiculous and rewarded blind luck more than skill or precision. Afterward the children invariably wanted to go to Chuck-E-Cheese, where the noise of the arcade games and the animatronic rock band made him so nervous he sometimes had to stand in the outer lobby, watching little Frank and Bonnie through the frosted glass entryway. More than once a manager had approached him there, asking who he was and what he was up to. When they returned to his apartment, he could unwind only when the children were in their sleeping bags and he was in the La-Z-Boy with a glass of inexpensive pinot and the latest National Geographic.

“Anyway,” Marion continued, “I paid her. Susie Park, I mean. She’ll be here Monday week.”

Monday week. For all her new-found airs – for all her remarks about his apartment and his job, his Hush Puppies and sleeveless cardigans, how you could see the road rushing by through a hole in his Volvo’s floorboards — she still talked like her bean-farming father from west Indiana. He rose from the couch. “I’ll write you a check,” he said.