My father was in charge of them, as an extracurricular duty: at football games he would sit at a gap in the ropes, selling tickets and making change from a flat green box whose compartments were curved to let your fingers scoop up the coins. At basketball games he would sit with the box at a little table just inside the school’s front portals, across from the glass case of silver trophies and around the corner from the supervising principal’s office. The green box would come home with him, many nights, for safekeeping. The tickets fascinated me—great wheels of them, as wide as dinner plates but thicker. They came in two distinct colors, blue for adults and orange for students, and each ticket was numbered. It was another kind of money. Each rectangle of the thin, tightly coiled cardboard possessed, at the right time, a real value, brought into play by a sports event; money and time and cardboard and people’s desire to see were magically interwoven. My father was magical, converting into dollars and quarters and dimes the Tuesday- and Friday-night basketball crowds and the outdoor crowd that straggled out of the town’s streets onto the football field on Saturday afternoon. (It was easy to sneak under the ropes, but many grown-ups didn’t bother, and paid.) The tickets, numbered in the hundreds, were worth nothing until he presided at his little table. He always made the balance right when he got his paycheck, or so he assured my mother. She had begun to get alarmed, and her alarm spread to me.

My memories of their conversations, the pressure of them, have me leaning my face against the grain of the wooden icebox, a zinc-lined cabinet whose dignity dominated our kitchen as it majestically digested, day after day, a succession of heavy ice blocks fetched in a straw-lined truck and carried with tongs into the house by a red-cheeked man with a leather apron down his back, to ward off the wet and the chill. I could feel the coldness on my cheek, through the zinc and oak, as my parents’ faces revolved above me and their voices clung to my brain.

“Embezzlement,” my mother said, a word I knew only from the radio. “What good will you be to any of us in jail?”

“I make it square, right to the penny. Square on the button, every other week, when I get my envelope.”

“Suppose Danny Haas some week decides to deposit the receipts on a Friday instead of a Monday? He’d ask and you’d be short.”