I deposited all seventy-one on the Monday. The teller was about twenty-three and asked no questions about the register numbers, because to her they were just checks, which is exactly what they were.

Two thousand nine hundred and eleven dollars went into the firm’s client hardship fund, which pays filing fees for people who cannot pay filing fees, and it covered fourteen of them.

The envelopes still come. Hannah opens them now. She deposits them monthly and I do not see them and I do not ask, and she has standing instructions about where the money goes.

I will be dead a very long time before that order is satisfied. That is simply a fact about the arithmetic and it has stopped being a fact about my life.

Brenda Miller died in February, in a rental apartment in Ocala, of a stroke, at seventy-four. A cousin told Hannah, who told me on a Wednesday, carefully, at the office.

I want to record my honest reaction, which was nothing at all for about four hours, and then, in the car, an enormous and disorienting grief that had no object I could name.