The Lakeview Motor Court had no view of the lake. It had a row of green doors, a vending machine chained to a post, and a shallow concrete pool full of bright blue water in which nobody was swimming. Leah parked beneath a dead security light and sat looking at number eight.
Walt was on a plastic chair outside it, eating something from a paper tray. He saw her through the windshield. He did not stand up.
She had pictured this before. Not this motel or the tray on his lap, but him, waiting at the edge of the life she had made. For the first few years she had pictured it often. Later it came to her only in particular bad moments: a strange car beside the house; a man who knew her name before she knew his; Kit coming home late.
In those imaginings she had always known what to say. She had known less when he actually called after he got out in 2020. Six years ago, his voice in the office phone, asking for his share. She had ended the call. For months afterward she had checked the road before unlocking the gate.
She got out.
“Hello, Lee.”
His voice had thickened. Or perhaps the voice she remembered belonged to a man who was always about to laugh.
“Where is she?”
“You want to sit down?”
“Where's my daughter?”
He pointed at the other chair with a wooden fork. His right leg was stretched out in front of him, the pant cuff caught above the ankle. A white scar ran down into his sock.
She remembered blood on the door handle. She remembered his hand hitting the rear quarter of the car as she moved. She had seen him fall in the mirror. There was no kinder version of it waiting underneath the one she knew.
“Walt.”
“She's fine.”
“I want to see her.”
“She's busy.”
Leah took a step toward him, and the door opened behind his chair.
Rosa Pike stood there in a sleeveless gray shirt, holding a can of sparkling water. Her hair was cut close to her head. The last time Leah had seen her, it had been long enough to get caught in a car window, which Rosa had insisted was somebody else's fault.
Neither woman spoke.
Rosa looked at the pickup. Then at Leah's boots, the business name embroidered on her shirt, the watch on her wrist. Not an expensive watch. Leah still wanted to take it off.
Rosa's letter had come to that business in 2013. Leah remembered the envelope more clearly than the words: her legal name, the correct address, a stamp stuck on crooked. She had read it twice, put it in a drawer, and never answered. Now Rosa was here without the drawer between them.
“You look all right,” Rosa said.
“So do you.”
“No, I don't.”
Walt set his food on the concrete. He got up more slowly than Leah expected, one hand flat on the arm of the chair. Standing, he was still big. She had forgotten that. The photograph had made him seem ordinary, a man at a cookout.
“Come inside,” he said. “You're baking out here.”
She stayed where she was. “Tell Kit to come out.”
“She's not here.”
“Then take me to her.”
Rosa crushed the can slightly in her hand. “This is going to be tiresome.”
Leah turned on her. “What's tiresome?”
“You arriving and telling everybody what to do.”
Through the open door Leah could see two beds, a television showing a cooking competition with the sound off, and a grocery bag full of towels on a dresser. They had food in the room, clothes over the backs of chairs. They were living here. She was the person who had arrived somewhere they had already been without her.
She went inside.
The air conditioner rattled in the wall. Walt pulled out the desk chair for her. She did not sit. Rosa shut the door and leaned against it.
“Call her,” Leah said.
Walt took his phone from his pocket. “She's going to be annoyed.”
“I can live with that.”
“Can you?”
He tapped the screen. Leah watched his thumb, thickened at the knuckle, the old burn above the nail. She knew the hand better than she knew his present face.
“Kitty,” he said when the call connected. “Your mother's here.”
Leah moved toward him. He held up a finger.
“No, the actual one.”
He put the phone on speaker.
“You sent her the car?” Kit said.
The sound went through Leah so hard she gripped the back of the desk chair.
“I told you I'd handle it.”
“Walt, you said the man was taking it to a place.”
“Your mother has a place.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“Kit,” Leah said.
A pause. In the background, a door banged and someone laughed.
“Hi, Mom.”
“Are you hurt?”
“No.”
“Where are you?”
“I'm doing something. I'll talk to you later.”
“Your car—”
“I know about my car. It's my car.”
The familiar sharpness was almost a comfort. “I've called you six times.”
“I can count.”
“Then answer.”
“Walt, take me off speaker.”
Leah put her hand out for the phone. Walt turned just enough to keep it beyond her fingers. It was a small movement. It brought back something else she remembered: that he disliked anyone taking an object from him, even something as stupid as a lighter.
“You're all right?” he asked Kit.
“I'm fine. I'm angry. Those aren't the same thing.”
“We'll talk.”
He ended the call.
Leah reached for the phone again. This time he put it in his pocket.
“Call her on your own,” he said. “She's got it.”
She did. It went to the recorded message.
Rosa took a drink from her damaged can.
“She's not a child,” Walt said.
“I know how old she is.”
“Good. That saves time.”
Leah looked at the bed nearest the window. Two pairs of reading glasses lay on the nightstand, along with a pharmacy bag and a pack of cards. On the floor beside it was a manila envelope with its flap open. For a moment she wanted to ask whose prescriptions they were. To talk about something that had happened to him since she left. The urge disgusted her.
“What have you got her doing?”
He sat down on the edge of the bed. “You might want to turn that question around.”
“Don't be cute.”
“She found me, Lee.”
“And you put those scratches in her car.”
He glanced at Rosa before answering. “You always looked under the wheel. I wanted you to know whose message it was.”
“You could have written your name.”
“I did. In the picture.”
Leah waited.
“Came looking. Knew your name. Not the one on your trucks. Knew where to ask about me. And she had something to offer.”
“What?”
Rosa laughed once. It had no pleasure in it.
Walt said, “What do you think?”
The room seemed to shrink around the beds.
Twenty years ago there had been four hundred and eighty thousand dollars in the back of Leah's car. Wrapped bundles, bags too heavy for the way people talked about money. Rosa in the other vehicle. Walt trying to reach the car with blood running into his shoe. Leah had looked at him and pressed the accelerator.
She had told herself Kit needed her.
Kit had been asleep at a babysitter's house. She hadn't known what a bank was.
“She doesn't have anything to offer you,” Leah said.
“That isn't what she said.” Rosa pushed away from the door. “We've got bills too.”
“I didn't say you didn't.”
“You didn't say much of anything.”
Walt reached for the paper pharmacy bag and moved it off the bed, though it wasn't in his way. “We're not going to do twenty years in one evening. Here's what we need now. We need a driver tomorrow morning.”
Leah stared at him.
“No.”
“Kit said you'd say that.”
“Does Kit know what you're asking?”
“Kit booked the driver.”
“What does that mean?”
“Means the seat was supposed to be filled by Lark. Turns out Lark's twenty-four and can't keep a front wheel on a car.”
Rosa went to the little refrigerator. She took out a second can and held it up in Leah's direction. Leah shook her head.
“Nobody's asking you to go inside,” Walt said.
“Inside what?”
He looked at her until she stopped pretending not to understand.
“I'm not driving you away from a bank.”
“You'll be driving more than me.”
The television chef lifted a lid, admired something, and smiled. Leah wanted to throw the whole set through the window.
“If you put my daughter inside—”
“She's not in my pocket. Ask her.”
“You just hung up on her.”
“Because you were grabbing at things.”
Leah went to the door. Rosa moved aside, but not far. They stood close enough for Leah to see the thin white scar at the corner of her mouth.
“Did you get that in prison?” Leah asked before she could stop herself.
Rosa's face did not change. “Did you get that watch at the mall?”
Leah lowered her eyes.
“Don't,” Rosa said. “I'd rather you were a bitch.”
Outside, a little boy in orange swimming shorts had arrived at the pool with a man carrying two folded towels. The man bent to test the water, and the boy shoved at him, laughing. An ordinary end to an ordinary afternoon.
Walt came out behind her.
“She isn't a hostage,” he said quietly.
“Then tell me where she is.”
“So you can take her home and make this into something that happened to her?”
“You know nothing about my home.”
“I know something about how you paid for it.”
She turned. He was close enough now that she could see he had shaved badly at the left edge of his jaw. She remembered holding a cold can of beer to a cut there while he complained that she was getting the pillow wet. The things a person remembered were no use at all.
“I gave you a day and an address,” he said. “Come back at nine tomorrow. Or don't. But if you want to see what your daughter's doing, it's a better idea than sitting at your place calling a phone she doesn't want to answer.”
She got into her pickup. He did not try to stop her.
She drove out to the road, pulled over past the motel sign, and sat with both hands on the wheel. A little line of blood had dried where she had scraped her knuckle in Kit's car. She rubbed at it until it opened again.
Then she called her daughter.
“I heard you,” she said to the message. “I know you said you're okay. I still want to see you. Tell me where.”
She stopped herself from adding, Right now.
It took more effort than she wanted to know.