The wealth he was so proud of was the poverty.

He had the truest thing in the world sitting at his own dinner table for twenty-two years — a wife of quiet courage, a daughter, a son — and he could not see any of it, because none of it showed up in the only column he knew how to read.

That is the real bankruptcy, I have come to think.

Not the seizure of my father’s assets, which came soon enough.

The bankruptcy was the man himself, who had everything the world could weigh and nothing that weighs anything at all, and never once knew the difference.

Chapter 20 — He Held the Line