Rosa's storage unit contained three boxes, a small refrigerator and a chair with a broken back.
“That's it?” Walt asked.
“That's mine,” she said.
He did not ask again.
The unit was on a gravel lot behind a place that sold propane and fishing bait. Leah arrived while Kit was arguing with the lock. The key turned but the door wouldn't rise. Leah came over, put a hand beneath the lower edge and helped her lift. It stuck halfway up. Inside, a plastic tub had fallen against it.
“I told them it was full,” Rosa said. “They put somebody else's crap in front of mine.”
“Whose is this?” Kit asked, pointing at the tub.
“Not mine.”
They got the door high enough to duck under. It was hot inside, the air thick with dust and the smell of old cardboard. Rosa pointed out what she wanted. The boxes had been labeled by a person who did not expect anybody else to read them: KITCHEN, OTHER KITCHEN, DON'T.
Kit lifted DON'T.
“It means don't stack things on it,” Rosa said.
“I thought it was a very short autobiography.”
Rosa took it from her. “Fragile.”
Walt went to help with the refrigerator. Leah stopped him. It was too low for the way he had to bend, and his face had gone tight before he got a grip. She and Kit took it between them instead. The cord dragged, caught, came free. At the truck Kit stepped backward onto loose gravel and Leah shifted her end before Kit asked. They got it onto the lowered tailgate with a grunt and a scrape that would not help the finish.
“You put your foot under it?” Walt asked Kit.
“No.”
“Good. Your mother's still got two thumbs. I'd hate to ruin the set.”
Leah looked down. The edge of her thumb had gone white where the weight had pressed it. She shook her hand and flexed her fingers.
Rosa stood inside the unit with the fragile box open. For a moment nobody spoke. Then she took out a plate, examined it and wrapped it again. Blue flowers around the edge. It looked as if it had been waiting there for a very long time.
“You're moving?” Leah asked.
“Eventually.”
“Where?”
“Somewhere with a refrigerator.”
She put the box down beside the truck. Under her irritation was an embarrassment Leah recognized. Having somebody see the little pile that was supposed to be your life.
They went back for the chair. Walt carried the boxes to the cab. Kit picked up a bag that had been hidden behind them and found a pair of roller skates inside.
“Yours?”
“My sister's kid,” Rosa said. “Outgrew them.”
“They're adult size.”
“She got tall.”
Kit looked at the scuffed wheels. “I was awful at this.”
“You had no fear,” Leah said.
“That was part of the awful.”
She put the skates back. Rosa took the bag and set it inside the unit, then changed her mind and carried it to the truck.
When they were done, Walt lowered himself onto the broken chair beside the open door. Kit stood with one shoe on the tailgate. Leah watched a man at the propane cage lift a tank into the back of a customer's car. He was wearing heavy gloves. An ordinary Saturday, more people getting ready to enjoy themselves.
“Bayline closes tonight,” Walt said.
Leah didn't answer.
“Rosa's worked some of the smaller events there. Knows how they do things.”
Rosa shut the truck door. “I know what I used to see. I haven't got a private tour of the safe.”
“Nobody said you did.”
Walt rubbed a hand over his face. Kit looked toward the road. Leah could see that they had talked about this before she arrived. Not a whole plan necessarily, but enough that the first words weren't the first words.
“What are we talking about?” she asked.
Walt looked up at her. “Current money.”
“There's current money everywhere. Most of it's owned.”
“I know.”
“Don't make it sound as if they leave it under a rock.”
“I said two words, Lee.”
She folded her arms. Her thumb was throbbing now.
Rosa leaned against the pickup. “They sell credit for the concessions. On cards, on phones. Most people pay for that electronically. Some use cash. There's booths. You saw them yesterday.”
Leah had seen the booths, with their little lines of people and signs about adding credit. She had not put them beside the bags Rosa was talking about. Now she did, and the day changed shape.
“How much?”
Rosa looked at Kit. Kit answered.
“They're expecting about twenty-five thousand admissions over both days. About one point two million through the concessions credit.”
Leah shook her head. “Not in cash.”
“No. They had just under a fifth of that in cash last year. They're working on somewhere between two hundred and twenty and two hundred and sixty thousand this time. I heard it in the vendor meeting. It wasn't a secret. They were explaining why they wanted the cash pickups clear.”
“Expected,” Rosa said. “Not a promise. Could be less.”
“And you're telling me they'll carry it past us in a paper bag.”
“I'm telling you they move it when the event closes,” Rosa said. “With people whose job is moving it. People watching. I know where a transfer happens. That doesn't mean I can make everybody disappear.”
Leah looked at Walt.
“This isn't a bank.”
“No,” he said.
“There are people we know there.”
Kit's mouth moved. She hadn't expected we know.
“There are people in banks,” Walt said. “We just don't know their names.”
The propane man shut the gate and locked it. He took off his gloves and slapped them together. A little puff of pale dust moved in the air.
Leah turned away from him.
“What were you going to do if I hadn't come?”
“Something else,” Walt said.
Kit gave a short, unhappy laugh. Leah heard her own answer from yesterday come back to her. Something else. A useful place to keep all the things a person hadn't figured out.
“You can't just have Kit ask Devon,” Leah said.
“Nobody's asking Devon,” Kit said. “He hasn't got anything to give us.”
“He works there.”
“So do I.”
Rosa pushed away from the truck. “I need coffee.”
There was a takeout counter beside the bait refrigerators. They bought coffee in cups too thin to hold, and Walt carried four of them to a picnic table beneath a faded awning. Rosa bought a banana too, peeled it halfway, and looked at the bruised flesh with a disgust so complete Kit started laughing.
“Don't,” Rosa said.
“I didn't.”
“You are.”
“It's the way you're looking at it. Like it owes you.”
Rosa broke off the bad end and threw it into the trash can. She ate the rest while Walt described what he knew, what Rosa knew, and what neither of them knew. Not a miracle. A place they could see, a transfer at the end of a long day, people whose movements depended on the work in front of them. There was a brief part of it that they believed might be unattended. Leah listened to that word and heard the weight they were putting on it.
“Believed?” she said.
“That's why you go look,” Rosa answered.
Leah drank the coffee. It was terrible, which at least made it hot for a reason. Kit had drawn her knees up onto the bench, resting her cup between them. She looked like someone at a family picnic waiting for the adults to finish telling a story she had heard before.
“And then what?” Leah asked Walt.
“Then we divide it.”
“Your boat. Her stage. Rosa's apartment. What do you imagine I get?”
“What did you imagine we got?”
Rosa stood. “I want an answer to the trucks.”
Walt turned toward her. She held his look.
“We're talking about this,” he said.
“You're talking about taking more. She hasn't said whether she'll give up anything.”
Leah could feel Kit watching her. “I told you. The loans—”
“Tell me one thing you'd sell.”
“The pickup. The white one. I'd have to find out what was left after the note.”
“Then find out.”
Leah took out her phone. Her thumb hovered over the office number. Nell might answer with Bell standing beside her. There might be an officer holding the keys Leah had hung on the hook. The ordinary work of finding a balance had become the thing she couldn't safely ask anybody to do.
Rosa watched her lower the phone.
“That's not the same as there being nothing,” she said.
“I know.”
“Good.”
Walt leaned forward over the table. “Nobody's buying a pickup today. We need to decide what we're doing with the day we've got.”
Rosa waited until he moved his hand. Then she sat.
Leah put her cup down.
Walt looked at Leah for a long moment. Then his face tired.
“I don't want to sit here counting what I missed,” he said. “I can. You've given me plenty. But I'd rather we did something that left us with a little life at the end.”
“You've got a life.”
He looked at the storage unit, at the boxes in the truck. “Yes. I have.”
Kit stared down into her coffee. Walt's answer had landed somewhere in her, Leah could see it. She kept both hands around the cup.
Leah thought of the little boat's table. Her house, with its filters beside the sink. The next equipment payment. Kit's stage opening out into a field, the seller's wife laughing as she backed out of the shot. A million sensible reasons to stop. A few reasons that weren't sensible at all, which made them harder to dismiss.
If she took Kit away, there would be Walt and Rosa left in this place with her lie. If she stayed, there would be current money. Enough to make the old money stop being the only thing in the room. Enough, perhaps, to keep the house and the business from becoming the next argument. She could tell herself she was doing it for all of them and there would be a piece of truth in it.
She wanted another drive. That was a piece too.
Kit looked at her. “You don't have to.”
“Neither do you.”
“I know.”
It made Leah angrier than a plea would have. Kit wasn't giving her a way to be the mother who had no choice.
The bait-shop door opened. A little boy came out carrying a tub with holes in the lid. His grandfather followed with a bag of tackle and told him to hold it level. The boy held it in both hands, carefully. He had something alive in there.
Leah watched them walk to their car.
“We look,” she said.
Walt said nothing.
“That's what I'm agreeing to now. We look. If it isn't what you think, we leave it.”
Rosa folded the banana peel into a napkin. “Fine.”
Kit nodded.
Walt got up, pressing on the edge of the table with one hand. “I can live with that.”
They took the boxes to the motel before heading back toward the lake. Rosa put the refrigerator against the wall in number eight, plugged it in, and stood listening until it began to hum. Kit helped her carry in the chair, whose back had finally detached in the pickup. Rosa put it on top of the wardrobe instead of throwing it away.
Leah went outside.
Before they left, Nell called. Leah answered outside, keeping the motel door in sight.
“The wagon's gone,” Nell said. “They took it last night. They left a receipt. I have it.”
“All right.”
“I couldn't take the late call. Denny covered until two, then I stopped answering. We can't promise two trucks when there's one driver.”
Leah looked at her flatbed. Kit was putting an empty bottle in the cab, looking for somewhere it wouldn't roll.
“You could have called me.”
“I did. Bell did. You know what you said.”
Leah pressed her free hand flat against the motel wall. Hot paint, grit under her palm.
“Have they been back?”
“This morning. Asking about you, the flatbed, Kit. They know you took the Earl job. I gave them the shop. I gave them nothing I didn't actually know.”
“You should.”
“I don't need you to tell me.”
From inside number eight Walt called to ask whether she was coming. She put a finger over the microphone, too late to know what Nell had heard.
“Was that him?” Nell asked.
“I'm not alone.”
“Come back, Leah.”
She had been braced for another question. The request was worse.
“I can't yet.”
“Yes, you can. You can come back and speak to them. I'm not telling you it will be fine. I haven't got that to give you. But you can stop doing this to everybody who answers a phone for you.”
Leah closed her eyes. Inside the room Rosa was telling Walt the refrigerator door needed a shove. Kit went to do it. Somebody laughed, a brief breath, and Nell heard that too.
“I need you to understand I'm not coming in to work for you tomorrow,” she said. “I don't know if I'm coming Monday. Pay Denny what he's done.”
“I will.”
“You won't. I will. I'm telling you what I'm doing.”
The call ended. Leah stood against the wall until the rough paint had left a pattern in her palm. Then she went inside and told Kit they were leaving.