Shall We Begin?
“Insurance,” he said.
I opened it anyway.
It was every dollar. Three years of it, logged in a clean, patient hand — dates, amounts, account numbers, the names of the shell companies, the wire routes out to the lender.
My father had been stealing from this man since before I finished graduate school, and this man had written down every cent of it as it happened, the way you’d keep a rain gauge.
I looked up at him and I didn’t understand yet what I was looking at.
“Grandpa,” I said slowly, “how long have you—”