They counted in the service yard behind the shuttered summer shop, beside Leah's parked flatbed. She had stopped Walt's pickup near the building and switched off its engine, leaving the headlights on. He took his ignition key from her without asking, then went to lower the tailgate.
In the headlights Leah could see a stack of picnic tables, a rusted chair, an advertisement for ice cream someone had put face down against the wall. The place smelled of warm gravel and spoiled fruit. A floodlight from the neighboring lot gave them enough light to see.
Nobody wanted to go back to the motel yet. Leah knew it without asking. Too much ordinary life there, too many windows. They had brought back something bigger than the room where Rosa had counted twenty-four thousand dollars.
Kit got out first. She walked to the fence and gripped the wire with both hands. Her shoulders moved. Leah went toward her, then stopped when she turned.
“Don't.”
“I wasn't going to say anything.”
“You were going to put your hand on me.”
Leah let it fall.
Rosa had the bag out of the car. She set it on the lowered tailgate. Walt stood beside her, leaning against the truck. The old injury had made him pale around the mouth.
“Your wrist,” Leah said.
“It's fine.”
“Not yours. The man's.”
He looked at her.
“He had my hand,” he said. “You saw.”
“I saw enough.”
“Then don't ask me to tell you a different thing.”
Rosa opened the bag. “If we're going to stand around being stupid, we can do it after.”
They began sorting. Leah did not help. She stood by the driver's door, watching the street beyond the fence. Every car looked as if it might turn toward them. Most continued down the road without slowing. Once a pair of headlights swept the lot and went past; Kit flinched hard enough to make the wire rattle.
Minutes moved badly. Too fast in the part of her thinking about people with phones. Too slow in the part watching Rosa's hands. Walt made a little tally on an old envelope, scratched something out, made it again. Nobody trusted the first count. They did parts of it twice.
Two hundred and forty thousand dollars.
The number became certain before anything else did.
Kit came away from the fence. “So that's it.”
“That's it,” Rosa said.
Walt sat in the pickup doorway for a moment, catching his breath. The gun was in the cab. Leah knew because he had put it there before he touched the bag. She had watched his hand come out empty. Now he put both hands on his knee and rubbed until his face loosened.
Kit looked at the money. Her skin had gone blotchy around the eyes.
“Izzy knows.”
“Yes,” Leah said.
“She's not going to think I didn't know.”
No. That was the trouble with somebody knowing you. You couldn't leave your face behind and call yourself a frightened stranger.
Rosa zipped the bag halfway, then stopped to tuck a loose bundle inside.
Leah moved before she had turned the movement into words. She took the flatbed key from her pocket and went to the tailgate.
“Put it in mine,” she said.
Rosa looked up. “Why?”
“We've got to move.”
“Then move.”
“Kit's coming with me.”
Her daughter said nothing. She stood about six feet away, watching.
“We haven't divided it,” Walt said.
“We'll do it later.”
Leah took one handle. Rosa kept the other. The bag shifted between them, its weight unbalancing the compromise.
“Let go,” Rosa said.
“There are people coming. Somebody will be.”
“Then stop pulling.”
Kit stepped closer. “Mom.”
“Get in the flatbed.”
“Why?”
“Because I said—”
She stopped too late. The rest of the sentence was in the yard with them.
Rosa's grip tightened. Leah pulled harder. She wanted the bag in her flatbed. She wanted Kit beside it. If she had those two things, she could decide the rest while the road opened in front of her.
Walt got out of the pickup.
“I know this part,” he said.
Leah turned toward him, still holding the bag.
He crossed the little space between them more quickly than she expected. His bad leg did not make him helpless. He caught the center of the bag and pushed it against the tailgate, trapping Leah's fingers beneath the handle. She loosened her grip with a sharp cry. Rosa held on.
“Not you,” Rosa told him. “Don't you do it too.”
He pulled the bag toward him. Rosa tried to keep it level, stepping sideways on the loose gravel. Walt drove his forearm against her upper body, not a punch so much as a hard furious clearing of space. Her feet slipped. She hit the corner of the concrete step by the shop door and went down.
The sound she made stopped Kit in mid-stride.
Walt had the bag.
For a moment nobody moved. Rosa lay on her side with her knees bent, one arm tight against her chest. Leah could hear her trying to draw a breath without making it hurt. Walt looked at her, then at his own hand, as if something had happened outside the part he had meant.
“Rosa—”
“Don't,” she said.
Leah went down beside her.
“Can you move?”
“Don't pull me.”
“I'm not.”
“Then don't ask it like you're about to.”
Kit stood between the truck and the women on the ground. She looked at her mother, then at Walt. His face had closed again. He put the bag inside the pickup, keeping his body between it and the rest of them.
“We're not doing twenty years again,” he said.
“She wasn't taking it,” Kit said.
Leah looked up. Kit saw her mother's expression and stepped back.
“Mom?”
Leah opened her mouth. She had a sentence ready. Just getting you away. Making it safe. Something with Kit in the middle that would make it sound less like a theft.
She didn't say it.
Walt turned toward Kit. “Come here.”
She stayed where she was.
He took cash out of the bag. Not a promise. He laid it on the tailgate, counted again under his breath, then pushed it toward her.
“Thirty thousand. Half of what you wanted. Yours.”
Kit looked at it. Leah could see the notes clearly beneath the floodlight, the bands Rosa had kept them in, a corner folded over. Real money. Not a figure on a forecast or a line in a text message. It would fit in Kit's bag. It would make the stage less impossible.
“What about the rest?” Kit asked.
“I'll keep my word.”
Rosa laughed from the ground, a broken ugly sound that became pain before it was finished.
Walt turned. “You all want what you're owed? Get in line. I stood in one for fourteen years.”
Leah put a hand beneath Rosa's elbow, stopped when she cried out, and changed her grip.
“Stay still,” she said.
“I'm trying.”
Kit had not picked up the money. Walt waited for her. The lake wind moved through the yard and lifted a piece of paper against the fence.
“Kit,” Leah said.
Her daughter looked at her.
“Come with me.”
“To where?”
“Somewhere else. We can work out—”
“You were going to take it.”
Leah did not answer quickly enough.
Kit's eyes filled. She blinked the tears away with a fury Leah could feel across the gravel.
“You were going to put it in your car and tell me to get in and then tell me afterward why it was for me.”
“I wanted you out.”
“I know what you wanted.”
Walt turned away, giving Kit the space of a person who wasn't going to argue her into anything. Leah knew he had learned that about her. Kit could see him doing it and still want what it offered.
Kit picked up the cash.
Leah watched her put it in her bag. Not every bundle fit at first. She had to take out the little pharmacy tube, a packet of tissues, her sunglasses. She set those things on the tailgate beside the remnants of the count.
“You can still come,” Leah said.
Kit looked at Rosa.
“She needs somebody to stay,” she said.
“Yes,” Leah answered. “She does.”
Kit swallowed. Then she went to the passenger side of Walt's pickup.
“Don't,” Leah said, too loudly.
Kit stopped with her hand on the door. She looked back at her mother. Her hand stayed on the handle.
“I'm going with him.”
Walt got into the driver's seat. He did not hurry her. That was another thing he could give her at no cost to himself.
Kit opened the door and climbed in. She pulled her bag onto her lap, both hands over it. Leah saw her fasten the belt.
Then the truck started. Walt backed it away from the building. The headlights moved across Rosa's face, across Leah's knees, across the stack of picnic tables. Kit looked straight ahead until the truck reached the road. At the last second she turned toward the yard. Leah could not see her expression anymore.
They went.
Rosa made a small noise. Leah looked down.
“You going to stand there,” Rosa asked, “or get me up?”
Leah knelt again. The gravel pressed into her skin. She took her time finding a way to help without pulling the arm that had gone wrong. There was work right in front of her. Somebody needed her to do it carefully.
Across the yard the little tube Kit had set on the tailgate lay on the ground. Walt's tire had crushed it flat. Leah saw the peach-colored smear on the gravel and then made herself look back at Rosa.