He had walked into a medical supply depot on a Monday afternoon five dollars short of a wheelchair and asked a stranger behind a counter whether there was anything that could be done, and a manager had knocked sixty-two dollars off a clearance display model, and my son had come out of that building with fifty-seven dollars in change in his pocket and had put it in the tin and then taken it out again to pay for the bus.

I looked at the piece of paper for a long time.

What I saw on it, on that Tuesday, was a child’s love written down as arithmetic.

What is actually on it, and what I see now when I look at the photograph of it that I took much later for the appeal, is a thirteen-year-old’s budget with no line in it for whether the thing he was buying would fit.

Part Eight: Mr. Keller