What I felt instead was a strange fidelity to the truth.

He had given me two hundred dollars, and told me to make it work, and to do exactly what he asked.

So I would do exactly what he asked, to the last cent, so I could let the doing of it speak the thing I had never been able to say out loud.

There is a particular power in obedience taken literally.

For years I had translated his instructions into their generous, unspoken meaning — make it work had always meant spend your own money and never mention it — and my willingness to perform that translation was the engine that kept the whole arrangement running.