She told it as a small triumph of thrift, laughing a little, proud of her own resourcefulness.
And Ezra had to turn his face to the window and look hard at the parking lot, because he was doing the math she wasn’t: that in the very month of that clever four-day chicken, thirty-five thousand dollars of his had landed in an account and been gone inside two days.
His mother had been inventing recipes to survive on nothing while her son wired a fortune into a hole in the floor.
She told the story as a happy memory.
He received it as the worst thing he had ever heard.
That, he came to understand, is what theft from the elderly really steals — not just the money, but the very ability to know how badly you were wronged.