one summer he had come back home at his mother 's insistence when his father was sick , and they had a quarrel in which the father asserted that white could achieve nothing on his own without his money , and so white countered by opening a law office in town , ostensibly to show his father up but also out of some grudging realization that now , at last , the old man was sicker than all the other times before and was probably , actually , finally , dying .