So they did the thing such people always do: they took what I gave, and then they resented me for having been in a position to give it, and they converted their own dependence into a story about my presumption.

Every dollar I gave my father was a small humiliation he had to avenge by belittling me a little more.

Every time I stepped in to cover a gap, I was not earning their gratitude; I was accumulating their debt, and people like that do not love their creditors.

They hate them.

It took me an embarrassingly long time to understand that I could not have bought my way into their regard, because the buying was precisely the thing they could not forgive.

The more I gave, the more they needed to diminish me, to keep the giving from meaning what it actually meant.