The kitchen light over the island had been out since June, and nobody had replaced it, so Maeve Sorensen counted her money by the gray light coming through the window over the sink. It was the end of August, a Thursday, a little after six. The sun had already dropped behind the Petersons' garage across the street, and the room had gone the color of weak tea.
She did not mind the dark. She liked the quiet of it. The refrigerator hummed. The faucet dripped once every eleven seconds; she had timed it in July, during a week when she had been too tired to do anything but sit at this counter and stare. The house smelled like the burned edge of the toast her sister had made after school and left on a plate by the stove.
The jar sat on top of her textbooks. It was a big glass jar, the kind pickles come in at a warehouse store, with a red screw-top lid and a strip of white masking tape running down one side. She had stacked the books under it without thinking, the way she always did: AP Biology on the bottom, then Precalculus, then the fat secondhand chemistry book she had bought online for twelve dollars and that still had someone else's name, BRANDON K., written in marker along the page edges. The books made a little stage. The jar stood on it like something on display.
She unscrewed the lid and tipped the money out onto the counter.
There was a way she did this. She had developed it over eleven weeks, and she did not vary it. Twenties first, faceup, all facing the same direction. Then tens. Then fives. Then the ones, which were the most and the worst, because they came from the tip cup at the Dairy Dip and were soft as cloth and smelled like waffle cone and other people's hands. She smoothed each one flat with the side of her thumb before she put it down. Then the coins, which she did not really count, just swept into a sandwich bag, because Grandma Bev said coins were for the bank to bother with.
Twenties: twenty-six of them. Five hundred and twenty.
She said the number under her breath and wrote it on the back of an envelope. Her hair kept falling forward, long and red and tangled at the ends because she had stopped bothering with conditioner sometime in July, and she shoved it behind her ear with the hand that wasn't holding the pen. The sleeves of her hoodie came down past her knuckles. It was a gray hoodie, enormous, from a 5K her father had run ten years ago, and it said MARLOW TURKEY TROT in cracked letters across the front. She had found it in a box in the basement in April and claimed it, and nobody had asked for it back.
Tens: thirty-one. Three hundred and ten.
She had not known, in May, what it would feel like to earn money in a way that hurt. She had thought she knew. She had babysat before; she had walked the Okafors' dog for a month in eighth grade. But the Dairy Dip was different. The Dairy Dip was a white cinder-block building on Route 9 with a walk-up window and a menu board that hadn't changed since 1994, and it was open from eleven in the morning to ten at night, seven days a week, from Memorial Day to Labor Day. Gil, who owned it, was seventy and had a pacemaker and a temper, and he paid eleven dollars an hour plus whatever went in the tip cup. Maeve had worked thirty-four hours a week there all summer. On the days she didn't have a shift until four, she babysat the Lindgren twins from eight until three-thirty, two boys who were six and who hit each other with pool noodles and cried when she made them eat anything green.
She had burned her wrist on the waffle-cone iron in the second week. There was still a pink stripe there, shiny, about the length of a matchstick. She had learned to make a twist cone with a curl on top that held. She had learned how her feet felt at nine-forty-five at night, when the floor of the stand was sticky and the fryer had been off for an hour but the smell of it was in her hair and would stay there through two washes.
Fives: thirty-eight. One hundred and ninety.
Ones. This was where she slowed down.
She did not hear the garage door, because the garage door had a broken spring and her father had stopped using it in July, too. She heard the side door instead, the one that opened from the driveway into the mudroom, and she heard the particular sound her father's keys made when he dropped them into the bowl on the dryer: a heavy, final chink, as if he were throwing the day away. She heard his boots come off, one, two. She did not look up.
"Kenz?" he called.
"In here," Kenzie yelled from the living room, where she had been for an hour with her phone and the television both going.