“Seventy-four million dollars,” I finally repeated, and my voice cracked on it.

“And he lived in a room the size of a closet, with two shirts and an old radio.

The arithmetic of it would not stop turning over in my mind, the monstrous, beautiful arithmetic.

Seventy-four million dollars, sitting untouched for twenty years, while the man who owned it wore the same two shirts until they were thin and listened to a secondhand radio because he could not risk a television, and lived in rooms that would have shamed a poor man, and ate what was cheapest, and denied himself every comfort and pleasure that his own money could have bought a thousand times over.

I had counted nickels over a laundromat and thought myself hard done by, and all that time my father, with a fortune legally his, had been living far poorer than I did, on purpose, for me.