Kit came back with the radio still clipped to her belt.
“Brenda's looking for somebody to cover a late assignment,” she said. “I can ask.”
Leah looked toward the money office. The light above its door had come on. Staff moved in and out carrying cups, clipboards, a battered plastic box with a lid that wouldn't stay flat. It was not yet a place where a robbery would happen. It was an office trying to get to the end of Saturday.
“Ask what?”
“To take Izzy's job. She goes back to the stage. Somebody she doesn't know comes through a door, she doesn't have to see it.”
Leah watched a man outside the office put down the plastic box and sit on it. He bent to tie his shoe. That was the sort of thing Kit meant to remove from an evening: a person who would be there because she had been told to be there. Leah wanted to say yes before she thought about it any longer.
“Ask,” she said.
They found Izzy beneath the little stage, sitting on the broken stool Leah had told her not to use. Its bent leg rested on a flat board. She was eating a packet of crackers and watching a singer through the gap beneath the platform.
“I fixed it,” she said when she saw Leah's face.
“I can see.”
“It's not a technical fix. It's a temporary relationship.”
Kit crouched beside her. The music was loud enough that she had to put her mouth near Izzy's ear. Leah stayed standing, catching pieces: swap, closeout, back here. Izzy frowned. She took another cracker, chewed it, and held out the packet to Kit. Kit shook her head.
“Why?” Izzy asked.
“Because you said you wanted to be here for the last set.”
“I did. Before somebody paid me to be elsewhere.”
Kit smiled. “You're always making it sound so mercenary.”
Izzy didn't smile back immediately. “It is work.”
“I know. I just thought—”
“It's three more hours. I'm taking the three more hours. I've already told my ride I'll be late.”
Onstage somebody struck a wrong note and kept playing. Izzy tilted her head, listening. Kit waited until she turned back.
“You'd still get paid if they put you on something else,” she said.
“What else?”
“I don't know yet. I could ask Brenda.”
Izzy looked at her more carefully now.
“Are they unhappy with me?”
“No.”
“Did somebody say—”
“Nobody said anything.” Kit put a hand on her shoulder. “I'm not doing that. I thought you'd rather be here.”
Leah could see the relief in the girl's face, followed by irritation that she had been frightened at all. Kit took her hand away.
“Ask Brenda if you want,” Izzy said. “But don't get my hours taken off because you've decided I'm having a sad time. I'm not having a sad time. I've got crackers.”
She offered the packet again, this time to Leah. Leah took one because saying no had begun to feel like another way of drawing attention. It was dry and broken, a grain of salt pressing against her tongue.
Kit stood up. “I'll find out.”
Izzy turned back to the gap beneath the stage. She had not been moved.
Brenda was in a narrow passage between the vendor office and a refrigerated trailer, listening to a man describe a problem with a payment terminal. Her purple shirt had a dark patch across the back. She held two phones, neither of them her own, and a pen between her teeth.
Kit waited. Leah stood beside her while the man repeated the description in a longer version. Brenda took the pen out, wrote a number on the back of his hand and told him who to ask for. He looked at the number as if she had done something unreasonable to him.
“Not there,” Kit told him when he turned toward the public lane. “Other side. The little tent.”
He went. Brenda looked at Kit.
“Please tell me something has finished.”
“I can take Izzy's closeout.”
“Why?”
“Devon's short on the stage. She knows the job there. I can do the other one.”
“I've put someone else on the stage.”
“He could go to—”
“No.”
Kit stopped. Brenda put one of the phones into her pocket and rubbed at the mark it had left in her palm.
“I have a list,” she said. “For once I have a list where there are enough people for the things on it. I'm not pulling it apart now.”
“I'm not asking you to pull it apart.”
“You're asking me to move a person who's said yes, find another thing for her, and tell the people expecting her something different. That's what pulling it apart looks like.”
Kit looked down the passage. The man with the number had gone to the wrong tent. She almost went after him. Leah knew the urge, the little practical escape hatch from a conversation that wasn't going her way.
“I can stay longer,” Kit said. “Whatever you need.”
Brenda's expression changed, not much. An offer she could use had arrived.
“North loading lane. After the last band. We need someone people recognize, not another volunteer they think they can drive through.”
Kit opened her mouth.
“Not instead of Izzy,” Brenda said. “As well. I still need her where she is.”
Leah saw Kit glance toward the service buildings. The last band, the cash transfer, the lane they would need to leave. Kit had tried to remove one obstacle and been offered a job standing inside another.
“How long?” Kit asked.
“Until Devon's vans are out and the last vendor clears. Twenty minutes if everybody behaves. I won't promise twenty minutes.”
“What about the volunteer taking my radio?”
“She'll take it now. You come back for one after the set.”
Kit nodded. “All right.”
Brenda took a folded sheet from her pocket and wrote Kit's name on it. The act seemed to quiet her. One gap filled. One fewer thing to think about.
“Thank you,” she said. “Properly. I know it's a long day.”
Kit did not answer quickly enough. Leah said, “It is.”
Brenda looked at her, noticing for the first time that she was more than a person standing near Kit. Kit introduced her. Her mother. Brenda smiled tiredly and said Leah had produced a very useful daughter.
“She did most of it herself,” Leah said.
Kit glanced at her. There was an instant in which they might have smiled at each other. It passed without either of them taking it.
Brenda's second phone rang. She went back into the office, calling to somebody to leave the door where it was. Kit and Leah stood in the passage.
“You didn't have to agree to that,” Leah said.
“Somebody has to do it.”
“We might not be here.”
“I'm trying to make this work.”
The words came out too sharp. Kit heard them, looked at her mother, then away. The little line beside her mouth had deepened. She hadn't made Izzy leave. She hadn't made Brenda change the list. But she had made one more person expect something from her.
She took the radio off her belt and went to hand it over.
Leah waited beside a stack of empty crates. She could see Walt beyond the trailers. He was talking to Rosa, his head bent close to hear her over the music. Rosa's face was annoyed. Whatever she wanted to say, he was not enjoying it. They were not a single waiting purpose; they were two people with their own ideas about how this would end.
Walt looked up and caught Leah watching. He came over alone.
“What happened?”
Kit had returned. She answered before Leah could.
“She's staying. I asked. They won't swap it.”
Walt looked toward the office. “All right.”
“Not all right. She'll be there because that's her job. She won't just go if I say.”
He rubbed his thigh. There was a white line of dried sweat at the edge of his collar.
“Then don't tell her to go.”
Kit looked at him.
“Let me handle what I handle,” he said. “You don't have to make everybody comfortable first.”
The words were almost kind. Leah watched them find the tired part of her daughter that wanted to stop rearranging people. Kit had spent all day making small things come out right. Walt was offering to be responsible for something she couldn't manage by being liked.
“She's my friend,” Kit said.
Walt nodded. “I know who she is.”
He went back to Rosa. There had been no gun in his hand. No threat they could name and argue about before it happened.
Kit stood with her hands in the pockets of her jeans. Leah had seen that posture at school doors, beside a car after an argument, in the office when a customer thanked her for helping and still called her little girl. Usually she reached for the task Kit had left unfinished. This one was still unfolding in front of both of them.
From beneath the stage Izzy appeared, carrying the stool under one arm. She saw Kit and came over.
“Brenda said you're taking the lane,” she said. “Thanks. I thought they'd put that on me too.”
Kit nodded.
“You get your three hours,” she said.
“Yep.” Izzy grinned. “And I don't have to carry this thing again. You're a witness.”
She set the stool beside the crates. Kit looked at the place where it stood, the bent leg still depending on that little piece of wood. Then she bent to pick it up and move it out of the passage.
Izzy stayed. “Brenda said I could still go if I wanted. She can put her niece on with finance. But I told her I'd do it.”
Kit set the stool down. “You can do the job.”
“I know. I mean, I don't want to be the one who doesn't turn up.”
Leah looked toward Walt. He had stopped by Rosa and was checking his phone. There was still time to go over there and tell him no. She could take Kit to the gate, or go alone. The people around them would finish this evening without knowing what had almost come through their door.
Izzy looked at Kit. “You're still taking over after?”
Kit didn't answer immediately.
“I need to catch Luis's sister,” Izzy said. “She's giving me a ride when he's done. If they keep me packing stuff after the transfer—”
“I'll be there,” Kit said.
Leah heard the promise cleanly. She could not mistake it for anything else.
“Can you bring my bag to the lane? It's under the red case. If I go back there now Devon'll find something for me to carry.”
“I'll bring it.”
Izzy exhaled. She had been ready to manage her own evening if she had to. Now she could stop worrying about one part of it. She touched Kit's wrist, quick and grateful.
“Thank you. I don't mind the job. It's the getting home.”
She went to the office. Kit watched her turn the corner, then crouched by the stool again. There was nothing left to do to it.
“You don't have to promise her that,” Leah said.
Kit kept her head down. “I can bring a bag.”
“After?”
Her daughter stood. “Don't.”
Leah could have made her say it. That was another thing she knew how to do, take a word until somebody had nowhere left to put it. She looked at Izzy's water bottle on the crate. A strip of pink tape ran around it so she could find it among other people's.
Kit picked it up. “She'll forget this.”
She went after her, carrying the bottle. Leah stayed beside the stool until Walt came back.
Before the last set, Leah drove the flatbed to the service yard behind the shuttered summer shop. Walt followed in his pickup. She had been here after the bank, in the wagon, and had thought of this as a place where one bad thing ended. There were weeds around the stacked picnic tables and a smell of spoiled fruit from a trash can over the fence. Nothing had ended here.
She parked beside the building, facing out. Walt got out of the pickup and waited while she checked the truck's door.
“You can leave the key,” he said.
“No.”
“Then keep it. I don't care.”
He cared enough to watch her put it in her pocket. He had the pickup key looped around one finger. When he saw her looking, he stopped swinging it.
“Four seats,” he said. “We all fit. You remember how to drive a different car?”
She looked at him. He smiled, and for a second she was tempted to answer the joke. She had loved being able to answer him once.
“I know whose truck it is,” she said.
“Good. Then we won't have another conversation about what name's on a piece of paper.”
He opened the passenger door for her. She climbed in after checking the flatbed key was still in her pocket. At the festival he would get out and she would take the wheel. Until then she sat beside him, looking at the road from a seat she hadn't chosen.
They collected Rosa and Kit at the staff gate. Rosa slid into the rear seat with a grunt. Kit climbed in on the other side, carrying Izzy's bag, which she set between her shoes. Leah saw a pink keychain on it. A small cloth bird with a flat, friendly face.
“She's trusting you with that,” Leah said.
Kit looked down. “It's clothes.”
Walt waited for her belt to click, then drove into the field. His pickup joined the vans and cars leaving later. Its plate was ordinary and visible. Mel was back on the gate for the evening shift. Leah watched him glance at it as he let them through.
When they stopped, Walt left the key in the ignition and got out. Leah moved into the driver's seat. It was too far back. She found the lever and brought it forward, then adjusted his mirror until the view behind belonged to her. Rosa watched the field. Kit sat still with Izzy's bag at her feet.
“Put it under the seat,” Rosa said. “She doesn't need a place in the car as well.”
Kit pushed it out of sight. Leah kept her hands on the wheel and watched the stage lights come on.