Elephant

When the narrator's brother initially asks him to borrow money, the narrator isn't all that hesitant to help out. He already has a number of people on his "payroll," as he puts it later, but he readily agrees to lend his brother the money. At the same time, he does seem to recognize—on some level, at least—that his brother isn't particularly reliable. Trying to increase the likelihood that his brother will repay his debt, then, the narrator comes up with a plan: instead of paying back the narrator directly, the brother will pay their mother the monthly installments that the narrator himself normally shoulders. That way, it's as if the narrator is losing the same amount of money each month. More importantly, though, the narrator thinks this plan will encourage his brother to repay his debt. Here, the narrator explains this thought process:

[...] he wouldn't stiff his own mother. Nobody would do that.

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This is a very clear instance of foreshadowing, since the average reader knows that, in reality, many people would do exactly that—people fail to pay back their parents all the time. It says something about the narrator's ideas about family and loyalty that he'd naively claim that nobody would "stiff his own mother." Maybe the narrator wouldn't fail to repay his mother, but he's surrounded by people who would. Given that this moment appears early in the story, the trajectory of the narrative becomes quite clear, as discerning readers instantly recognize that Carver has drawn an invisible boundary that, regardless of the narrator's optimism, will certainly be crossed.