The Incorporation Form
My accountant is a man named Terry Almquist, who has been doing my taxes since the second Bush administration, and who has the reassuring professional demeanor of someone who has watched three generations of Vermonters try and fail to claim their tractors as dependents. Terry works out of a one-story brick building in Montpelier that used to be a dentist's office, and which he has left mostly unchanged on the theory that people who come to see an accountant should feel, at some low dental level, that they are about to be worked on.
I went to see Terry on a Wednesday in the third week of March, with two manila folders and a shoebox and an unopened envelope from PayPal that I had been carrying around for a week the way you carry a bad test result. By that point the PayPal account had received, without my soliciting or consenting, just over forty-one thousand dollars in donations from people I did not know. I had not spent any of it. I had not touched any of it. I had, I am embarrassed to say, not even looked at the full balance, because every time I tried to open the email my stomach made the small specific noise it makes when a raccoon gets into the trash.
Terry listened to me for forty minutes without interrupting, which is why Terry has clients, and then he leaned back in the chair that had once belonged to a dentist and he looked at the acoustic tiles on his ceiling for a