Kit showed her the message because it was easier than saying it.
She held the phone out across the space between the bed and the chair. A group conversation, Kit and Walt and Rosa. It had begun in July, before the first robbery. Leah read only the part her daughter pointed at.
I can get her to put it right. She has it. You don't get three trucks and a house from being good at paperwork.
Below it, Walt had written: You sure?
Kit's answer: Yes.
Leah gave the phone back.
“I didn't know how else to make them listen,” Kit said.
“You could have come to me.”
“For what?”
“To ask.”
“I did ask. In December. I had the whole stupid folder. Remember? You kept turning the pages back.”
Leah remembered the folder. Kit had put little tabs on the edges, written categories on them. The more she had tried to prove she was ready, the less Leah had liked it.
“You asked me to help you buy something.”
“I asked you to look at it.”
“I looked.”
“Then you called Devon and told him I hadn't thought it through. You told him I could go get myself in debt, but he didn't have to follow me.”
Leah opened her mouth. Closed it.
“I know what you said,” Kit told her. “He didn't keep it a secret. We aren't twelve. You didn't get to put us in separate rooms and find out who'd crack.”
There was a thing Leah could have said about Devon's part in the conversation. He had been worried about the payments. He had asked a question, then another. But that would have made him the argument again, a person not in the room to defend the part she gave him.
“I was wrong to call him.”
Kit looked at her sharply.
“I mean it.”
“Okay.”
She did not say thank you. Leah was glad. She had begun to suspect she had spent a great deal of her life making Kit thank her for things.
The curtain moved in the draft from the air conditioner. It had a little brown burn near the bottom. Leah found herself staring at it, grateful for an object she could look at without hurting anybody.
“Did they agree because of that?” she asked.
Kit nodded.
“Rosa wasn't interested in listening to me. She thought I was there to ask questions, then go home and feel interesting. Walt was nicer. But I said I could get them their money. That's when it changed.”
“And your money?”
“I was supposed to have a stake. From the jobs. Sixty thousand. I wasn't asking them for yours.”
“Mine isn't mine.”
Kit glanced up. “I know that now.”
“You knew it was stolen.”
“Yes.”
She did not try to get out of it. That should have made the conversation easier. It didn't.
“I wanted you to have to show up,” Kit said. “Not just pick up the phone and tell somebody something about me. Show up and do it.”
“You didn't know he'd bring me here.”
“I didn't know he'd send you my car. I thought we'd talk to you. Together. Walt said I should let him decide how.”
Leah rubbed her palms on her jeans. “He's very good at that.”
“So are you.”
Outside a door opened. Walt said something to somebody in the next room, a casual greeting. His voice had become another part of the motel's machinery: the television, the pipes, Walt knowing somebody's name.
Kit got up.
“I have to tell them.”
“I'll tell them.”
“I made the promise.”
“It's my money.”
Kit waited.
Leah let out a breath. “I'll come with you.”
They went next door. Walt was washing a fork in the sink. Rosa sat on the bed threading a needle through a shirt collar. She wore the new socks. It was ten at night and she had put them on anyway.
Kit stood inside the door. “There isn't a fund.”
Rosa lowered the shirt.
“What fund?” Walt asked, though he knew.
“The money. Mom spent it. She has things. Loans. There isn't a box somewhere.”
Walt set the fork down. Water ran from his hand into the sink.
“All of it?”
Leah nodded.
He looked toward the bathroom. Then back. “How much did you think there'd be left for us?”
She wanted to say she had been young. She had been frightened. Twenty years could look very short if you described them quickly enough. She had learned that from bank payments, from the interest that kept working while she wasn't watching.
“I didn't,” she said.
Walt looked at Kit, then back at Leah. “I kept more than your name out of what I said. I'd have had to give them a lot more of my own life to tell it straight. Other things. Other people. And there was a four-year-old I knew.”
Kit's face went still.
“Don't make that a present,” Rosa said to him. “I wasn't doing it for a child. I wasn't opening my mouth about everybody I knew. Then I got out and wrote to her like a fool.”
“I read it,” Leah said.
“Well, that was a busy afternoon for you.” Rosa picked at the folded shirt. “I wanted a share, not another case. You knew that too.”
Walt looked toward the door. “I called you when I got out. You hung up. I wasn't going to drive down there, start something and go straight back inside. So I tried something else. Then your daughter came asking.”
Leah nodded. Kit was looking at her, waiting for a part of this she could contradict.
Rosa put the needle into the shirt and folded it once.
Walt dried his hands. He did it carefully, rubbing each finger, then turned off the water he had left running.
“I had a room once,” Rosa said. “After I got out. Place over a barber shop. In summer it smelled like hot hair. You'd open the window and it got worse. I thought if I could get the deposit back I'd go somewhere else. But there was always a reason they couldn't give it to me.”
Leah stayed by the door.
“I'm not asking you to feel sorry for me,” Rosa said. “I'm telling you something that happened while you had our money.”
“I know.”
“No. You didn't. Now you do.”
Walt sat down. His face had gone still. Kit took a step toward him, then stopped.
“I thought,” she began.
“I know what you thought, Kitty.”
“I wasn't trying to lie.”
“I know.”
He said it gently. He could still be gentle with Kit, and Leah was grateful and resentful at once.
“Then that's it,” Leah said.
Rosa looked up. “That's what?”
“We can't get it back. You heard her. She's done what she said she'd do. She brought me. Now we stop.”
Walt's eyes moved to her face.
“You think she came in with a promise, so the promise belongs to her, but the answer belongs to you.”
“She can't pay you what I took.”
“No,” he said. “She can't.”
Kit reached for the doorknob.
“I'm tired,” she said. “I'm going to sleep.”
Nobody tried to stop her. Leah followed her out, but at number nine Kit held the door without opening it wide.
“Not more tonight.”
“Are you going to be here in the morning?”
“Yes.”
“Will you call me if you go anywhere?”
Kit looked at her.
Leah corrected it. “Will you tell me?”
“I'll tell you if I'm leaving town.”
It was what she offered. Leah took it and stepped away from the door.
Leah stayed at the motor court. She had told Kit she would leave her alone, and did: she took a chair outside number eight, far enough from her daughter's door that nobody had to climb over her to get out. Walt brought her a blanket from his room. She let it lie folded over her knees.
At one, the room beside the office emptied. A man came out in socks to put a suitcase in his car. The woman with him carried a sleeping child, tucked feet into the passenger seat and then returned for a pillow. Leah watched them go without wondering where. She wanted that right back, the right to be leaving for a reason nobody would ever ask about.
Near two, the chill drove Leah into the flatbed. She spread the blanket over the seat and tried to find a position her back would forgive.
Nell's last message stayed on her phone. They have the wagon. You need to call him back.
She had called him back. That was a fact she could cling to if she left out the rest of the conversation.
At six she went to the motel office and bought coffee that the owner told her had just been made. The owner watched it come out, too pale, and replaced the bag while Leah waited. She took the first cup anyway. She had no appetite for a small improvement that cost more time.
Her phone rang. Kit.
For a moment she was too relieved to answer properly.
“I'm here,” she said.
“I know. I called you.”
Leah shut her eyes.
“Walt wants to talk about something,” Kit said. “We're taking Rosa to pick up a thing she left at the storage place. He said you could meet us.”
“What thing?”
“Her things, Mom. Not a gun in a birthday cake.”
“I didn't say that.”
Kit was quiet for a second. “I'm asking if you'll come.”
Leah looked through the motel office window at her flatbed. Yesterday it had carried a paying customer's car. This morning it sat among the guests' vehicles with a blanket over the seat and an empty cup on the floor. She could not take it back to the yard and become the woman who had left in it.
“Where?” Leah asked.
Kit gave her the address.
She changed in the flatbed, crouching below the window while the cab filled with the warm smell of her own work clothes. The shirt from yesterday had a white line across the back where Kit's hand had hit it in the car. Leah folded it and pushed it behind the seat.
She went out to meet them.