On Father’s Day my millionaire son walked into my freezing apartment, saw the tinned soup on the table, and asked how I was managing on the eight thousand a month his wife sends me. I told him nobody sends me anything.

Emmett found it. I let him find it, and I let him pay the deposit out of the account that is in my own name, which is a comedy nobody in that family has laughed at yet.

That letting took about four days of argument and two of them were bad.

The money is still in that account.

All two hundred and eighty-eight thousand of it, give or take about four hundred in interest.

Nobody has touched it. Nobody is entirely sure what it is for now, and the four of us have had about three conversations about it that have gone nowhere, which is its own small comedy.

I opened the boxes.

All four boxes. Over about eleven days, at a kitchen table, with a letter opener and a bin bag.