“How will I get my mail?” I doubt Robin’s even gotten to Camp Juliette yet, but I’m already yearning for sacks of love letters from her. Also, the tickets to the Woodstock music and art festival should be winging this way soon.

The paterfamilias is steely quiet, as if incensed that I have the temerity to question his authority. Or maybe it hasn’t occurred to him that I actually get mail? “I’ll arrange for that,” he says.

“Can I get it myself?” Bay Shore is probably a two-hour round trip, but if that’s what it will take to retrieve a letter from my ladylove, I’ll gladly make the journey.

The paterfamilias rears up to maximum possible height, as he always does when challenged. The next words are clipped, almost a growl: “I said I’ll arrange it.”

In the house of dashed dreams,

The paterfamilias makes the rules,

The paterfamilias breaks the rules.

What are we who are ruled to do?

The paterfamilias has gone to take a shower. I bite into the golden-brown crust of a mini-pizza. The yellow post office form lies unsigned on the kitchen table. Now that it’s understood that I’m not being exiled to some Siberian existence in Bay Shore, I’m pretty sure I know what this is about. It’s another one of his business scams. I’ve been an unwilling participant in the paterfamilias’s hustles since I was old enough to ride a bike and sign my name. After he got the chain of Laundromats — I was around twelve at the time — he added an additional chore to my role as indentured family servant and child laborer: two or three times a week, I had to get on my one-speed balloon-tire Schwinn after school and pedal to banks, where I would convert a couple of natural peanut butter jars’ worth of coins into bills. For every one hundred dollars of nickels, dimes, and quarters, my father took ninety-five and gave me five. He mapped out a dozen banks that I could bike to, each one visited roughly once a month so as not to raise suspicions. The farthest ones took nearly forty minutes to reach and required that I pedal along the curb of the Long Island Expressway service road, where cars barreled past at more than fifty miles an hour.

If someone at a bank asked where I’d gotten so much change, I was supposed to say that I babysat and walked dogs, cut lawns and shoveled driveways, raked leaves and washed cars. Strangely, no one ever asked why I only brought in change and never bills. And my father never explained why I had to pretend I’d earned the money myself. But you’d have to be a major doofus not to think it was part of some scheme to get around a corporate regulation or avoid paying taxes.