Summary

Apollo, now 37, and Emma, now nine months pregnant, lived together as a married couple in a Manhattan apartment. On his way to appraise books at the home of a recently deceased man, he remembered his mother saying of the houses, “Those are for owning not renting” (36).

The dead man’s white ex-wife answered the door with her white 30-something-year-old son, who “waggled [Apollo’s] business cards as if he was a bouncer checking ID” and “assumed superiority as a kind of birthright” (37). However, “Apollo decided to call the man Igor, no matter what his real name turned out to be” (36). The son’s actions are later compared to “a toddler scrambling for his toy” (39). The ex-wife scolded her son and Apollo likened her strength to that of his own mother.

Ultimately, Apollo offered some money for two books, one of which he...