Danny Haas, I knew, taught senior-high math and headed up the school athletics program. A short man who smoked cigars and wore suits with broad stripes, he was one of the righteous at the town’s core. My tall father and he sometimes clowned together, because of their height discrepancy, but it was clear to me who had the leverage, the connections, the power to bring down.

“He won’t, Lucy,” my father was saying. Whenever he used my mother’s name, it was a sign that he wanted to end the conversation. “Danny’s like all these Dutchmen, a slave to habit. Anyway, we’re not talking Carnegie-Mellon bucks here, we’re talking relative peanuts.” How much, indeed? A ten-dollar bill, in those days, looked like a fortune to me; I never saw a twenty, not even when the recipe box was fullest.

“Nobody will think it’s peanuts if it’s missing.”

My father became angry, as much as he ever did. “What can I do, Lucy? We live poor as dump dogs anyway.” The phrase “dump dogs” had to be one he had brought from his other life, when he had lived in another state and been a boy like me. He went on, venting grievances seldom expressed in my hearing. “We’ve got a big place here to heat. We can’t all go naked. The kid keeps growing. My brown suit is wearing out. Mom does what she can in her garden, but I’ve got five mouths to feed.” He called my grandmother “Mom” and exempted her, I felt, from the status of pure burden. My mother’s work at her wicker desk produced no money, my grandfather in his pride had bought too big a house, and I—I didn’t even go out and shovel snow for neighbors in a storm, because I was so susceptible to colds. My father was warming to his subject. “Count ’em—five! Nihil ex nihilo, Dad used to say.” “Dad” was his own father, dead before I was born. “You don’t get something for nothing,” he translated. “There are no free rides in this life.”

My mother feebly used the word “economize,” another radio word, but even I could feel it was hopeless; how could I go without my Tastykake when nobody else in my class was that poor? My father had to go on stealing from the school, and would someday be chased in his barrel down the Town Hall steps.