At eight in the morning Leah cut a piece of toast into four squares before she remembered she was alone.
She stood at the counter with the knife in her hand. Kit had disliked crusts as a child, and Leah had refused to cut them off. Four squares was the compromise. All four had crust, which was a useful lesson of some kind. Leah could no longer have said what it was.
She ate the toast standing up. Outside, a neighbor's sprinkler clicked around and around, watering the sidewalk. Her phone showed no message from Kit.
The service wagon smelled of the solvent Nell used on the dashboard. Leah checked a loose trim piece beside the driver's seat, snapped it back into place and caught herself checking it again. She stopped. There was no amount of checking this vehicle that would make what she was about to do sensible.
At the motor court Walt was waiting with a paper sack.
“Breakfast,” he said.
“Where's Kit?”
“Coming.”
He handed her a wrapped sandwich and she put it on the dash.
“You're not eating?”
“I've eaten.”
“All right.”
He got into the front seat. His leg gave him trouble as he turned; he took hold of his pant leg and lifted it by hand. Leah pretended to adjust the mirror until he was settled.
“That doesn't help,” he said.
“What?”
“Not looking.”
Rosa came out of number eight carrying a canvas bag. She wore a white blouse over dark pants, clothes Leah might have passed in a supermarket without noticing. She put the bag in the back and sat behind Walt.
“Why are we waiting?” Leah asked.
“Because it isn't nine,” Rosa said.
At two minutes past, Kit came around the corner of the building.
For a second Leah didn't recognize her. She had cut her hair to her jaw and tucked it behind both ears. Her face was thinner than it looked in photographs, or perhaps Leah had been carrying the face of a younger girl. She wore a loose green shirt and jeans. A black bag hung across her chest.
She stopped beside the open driver's window.
“You shouldn't be here.”
Leah reached out and touched the inside of her wrist.
Kit looked down at the hand. She did not pull away immediately. Then she did.
“You weren't answering.”
“So you thought you'd rob a bank?”
“Get in.”
“That's a fantastic reason.”
“Kit.”
Walt leaned across, not far enough to crowd Leah. “We can do this here all morning or we can go. Your choice.”
Kit looked at him. “I didn't ask you to call her.”
“I know.”
“That's not an answer.”
“It's the one I've got.”
She opened the rear door and climbed in behind Leah. The smell of peach lotion entered the wagon, and Leah wanted to turn around and hold her so badly it hurt her teeth. Instead she said, “Put your belt on.”
“Of course that's the bit you're worried about.”
But the buckle clicked.
They drove through the middle of Port Ash. Morning traffic moved around delivery trucks, a garbage crew, a cyclist carrying a baguette in the basket of his bike. Leah had driven these streets in rain and ice, towing people who were late, sick, angry, embarrassed. She knew the storefront that had been three different restaurants in six years, the little rise where the lake first became visible between buildings. Today the familiar streets offered her no reassurance. They belonged to people going about their lives. She was taking something into them.
Walt talked. He told her where they were headed and the little he expected her to do. His voice was ordinary. The place was a bank in a low commercial strip, not a fortress, not a rich man's house. There would be people inside who did not know he was coming.
Leah cut him off before he could turn those people into a set of times and positions.
“I know what waiting in a car means.”
“Then wait in a car.”
From behind her Kit said, “He wasn't trying to insult you.”
Leah looked at her in the mirror. “Don't start.”
Kit turned to the window.
That was how she had lost the next ten minutes, Leah realized afterward. Not because nobody had offered her another choice. Because she had spent it being offended by the wrong thing.
They stopped in the bank's lot with the sun on the windshield. A woman carrying a large square purse crossed in front of the wagon. She had a little boy by the hand. He was walking backward and explaining something that required a lot of movement from his free arm. Leah heard the word dinosaur through the glass.
Walt opened his door.
“Wait,” Leah said.
He looked at her.
“Not with him in there.”
The boy had gone through the outer door. His mother stopped to look for something in her purse.
Walt watched them. Rosa stayed still in the rear seat. Kit was looking at Leah's reflection now.
“All right,” Walt said.
He shut his door.
They sat. A minute passed. Then another. The sandwich on the dash gave off the smell of egg and warm paper. Leah wanted to be sick. She had achieved a delay and was treating it as a mercy. Inside the bank somebody else would take the little boy's place. A grown person with a mortgage, or a bad knee, or a sick parent waiting in a car.
“We can go,” she said.
Nobody answered.
“Now. Just go.”
Kit leaned forward between the seats. “And do what?”
“Something else.”
“You've got a something else for me?”
“We can talk.”
Kit settled back.
The woman and boy came out. He had a lollipop. He wanted his mother to watch him spin it by the stick, and she did, smiling tiredly. Leah waited for them to get into their car. She watched them drive away.
Walt said, “Are we finished?”
She should have told him yes. Finished with this, with him, with every version of herself that had ever liked being useful to men carrying guns.
She kept both hands on the wheel.
Walt got out. Rosa followed. Kit's door opened last.
“Kit.”
Her daughter bent to the window. Her face was close now, without the mirror between them. There was a small red mark above her eyebrow. A scrape from the wreck. Leah had not imagined it; Kit had been hurt, a little, and Leah hadn't been there.
“Come sit in the front,” Leah said.
Kit's mouth moved. Not a smile.
“I know what you do when everybody else's door is open.”
She turned away.
Leah watched her go into the bank.
The first sound from inside was not a gunshot. It was a flat knock, something heavy hitting a surface. Then a woman's voice rose and broke off. Leah could see through part of the outer door and the glass beside it, but not far into the room. A man in a pale shirt appeared, walking backward with his hands raised at shoulder height. Rosa moved across his path. She was holding the canvas bag.
Leah's right foot shifted. All she had to do was press down and turn. Leave. She could get out of the lot before anyone came back through those doors.
That had been her gift, once. Finding the place where everybody else's choice stopped and hers began.
She lifted her foot from the accelerator and set it flat on the floor.
A car pulled into the next space. An old man in a sun hat got out carefully, using the top of his door for support. Leah turned toward him. He nodded as if they had met in church.
“Don't go in,” she said.
He cupped a hand to his ear.
She lowered her window. “Don't go in there.”
“Closed?”
“Something's wrong.”
He stood between the cars, uncertain, holding a bank envelope. From inside came another cry. This time he heard it. He looked at the door, then at Leah.
She had become part of what he needed to understand.
“Go back to your car,” she said.
He did, slowly. He did not drive away. He took out his phone.
Inside the bank a woman stumbled into the edge of Leah's view and went down. It was not a dramatic fall. Her leg folded, her arm hit the glass, and she dropped out of sight. A man crouched beside her, one hand spread against the floor. He looked toward something Leah could not see. His mouth was open. She could not hear what he was saying.
Leah opened her door.
At that instant Walt came out of the bank carrying the canvas bag. His face had changed. It was not rage or fear exactly, but a hard blank attention that she remembered and had not missed. He saw her door and said her name.
Rosa came after him. She was moving too fast for dignity, one hand holding her blouse closed at the throat. Kit was last.
She had a gun.
Leah had known there would be guns. She had known it in the way a person knows a house has wiring: a fact inside the walls. Now there it was, black against her daughter's hand.
Kit looked over her shoulder at the glass doors. Then at Leah.
“Get in the car,” she said.
She was not asking to be saved.
Walt shoved the bag onto the floor. Rosa got in behind him. Kit ran around Leah's open door and pushed it toward her.
“Mom. Move.”
The old man in the sun hat was talking into his phone. Leah saw him clearly, saw the envelope crushed in his other hand. He was going to remember her. He would remember that she had warned him and stayed.
She pulled her legs inside. Kit slammed the door and jumped into the back.
“Go,” Walt said.
The wagon lurched out of the space. Leah heard the canvas bag roll against the seat support, heard Kit hit her shoulder on the window, heard herself say, “Belt,” and then they were out in the street with all the other people who thought they knew where they were going.