| I had never had money, and then I did. For three days in New York, I learned how not to use it.  Photograph by Larry Towell / Magnum Today, in The Weekend Essay, Andre Dubus III reflects on briefly living large in the Big Apple. It’s the summer of 2001, and I’m trying to check into the Royalton on Forty-fourth Street, but my credit card has been declined. The receptionist is in a silk blouse, and she glances behind me at my road-tired, happily expectant family: at my wife and three young kids, at my mother and older sister, her toddler daughter in her arms. “I’m sorry, sir. Is there another I might use?” On her face is an expression I know well, for I grew up with it. It was on the faces of the mechanics who’d shake their heads at my young single mother when she asked if she could pay for a car repair in installments; it was on the faces of teen-agers working the cash registers at grocery stores when, once again, the total would be too much, and I and my siblings would have to set aside the eggs and the peanut butter, the apples and the cans of soup, sometimes even the milk; it was on the faces of gas-station attendants when my mother would scour through her purse and ask for “A dollar and thirty-seven cents worth of gas, please”; and it was on the faces of landlord after landlord as they stood in our doorways asking for the rent, which was late yet again. Now, on this hot evening in the lobby of the Royalton, I ask my mother and my sister if they have a credit card for the deposit. They do not, but my mother, sixty-three years old and still working, her hair just beginning to gray, is smiling at me. She knows that this time will be different. I say to the woman at the desk, “Will you take cash for a deposit?” | 
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