Step Nine: the Check's in the Mail

One afternoon during my college years, an idea on the order of a revelation came to me. I should quit my part-time tutoring job and push my way into the renting office of the building my family managed. My mother, my aunt, and my sisters had conspired to keep my father out of the business, but they wouldn't do the same thing to me. So my thinking went. In handling rent money paid by the tenants of the single-room occupancy, I could easily find a way to siphon funds for my own personal use. The justification for such an action continued to present itself to me. Hadn't I grown up with my mother's stories of how her sister, my aunt, had purchased the building only to fall victim to unscrupulous people, including the current owner, who took title to the property and kept us on as the managers? Wouldn't I, if I began to extract sums of money, simply be righting a long-standing wrong? Such was the epiphany that gripped me that afternoon.