I simply stood in the dark and listened to my father — who had not been able to drive twenty minutes to my husband’s funeral — pound on my door at six o’clock in the evening, demanding entry, because a newspaper had told him there was money and he had discovered he could not have it.

There was, I noticed, no part of his shouting that asked how I was.

He had not come to console his widowed daughter.

He had not come, six months too late, to apologize.

He had not come to grieve with me, or to help me, or even to pretend.

He had come because I had done something with a large sum of money without consulting him, and the possibility that the money might be beyond his reach had brought him to my porch at a run, pounding, when three caskets had not been able to bring him across town.

I let him pound.