The economics of my grandfather’s household seemed simple: my father brought home his pay every other week in a brown envelope, and the money was dumped in a little red-and-white recipe box that sat on top of the icebox. Anybody who needed money fished it out of the box; each lunchtime I was allowed six cents, a nickel and a penny, to buy a Tastykake on the way back to elementary school. My grandfather did the packaged-food shopping at Tyse Segner’s store, a few houses away. Tyse, who lived in the back rooms and upstairs with his wife, was a man of my grandfather’s generation—a rather ill-tempered one, I thought, considering all the candy he had behind his counter and could eat for free whenever he wanted. My mother, usually, bought fresh meat and vegetables at Bud Hoffert’s Acme, two blocks away, past the ice plant, up on Second Street. Bud wore rimless glasses and a bloody apron. My grandmother did the cooking but never shopped; nor did my father—he just brought home, as he said, “the bacon.” The little tin recipe box never became so empty that I had to do without my noontime Tastykake. I moved a kitchen chair next to the icebox to stand on while I fished the nickel and the penny from the box, beneath a clutter of folded dollars and scattered quarters. When the tin bottom began to show, more coins and bills somehow appeared, to tide us over, and these, it slowly dawned on me, were borrowed from the high-school sports receipts.