***
She worked the four-to-close at the Dairy Dip that night, because it was Friday of Labor Day weekend and Gil would have fired her otherwise, deposit or no deposit. It was the busiest night of the year. She made a hundred and six cones and burned the same wrist again, a little, in almost the same place. At nine-thirty, when the line finally thinned, Gil came out of the back with two root beer floats and handed her one and said, "Your grandmother called me."
"She what?"
"Called the stand. Around three. Said you'd had a hard week and to go easy on you." He sat down on an overturned bucket with a grunt and pressed a hand flat against his chest the way he did, over the pacemaker, as if checking it was still there. "I told her I don't go easy on anybody. She said she knew that. Then she told me to tell you she's proud of you. So. She's proud of you." He drank some of his float. "I'm not saying I am. But she is."
Maeve laughed for the first time in what felt like days. It came out of her too loud and a little wild, and Gil looked at her sideways and didn't say anything else, which was the kindest thing he could have done.
When she got home at ten-forty, the floodlight over the garage was on, and her father was in the side yard.
The boat had been there as long as Maeve could remember. It sat on a rusting trailer between the garage and the fence, under a blue tarp gone gray with years of sun, with weeds growing up through the trailer's wheel wells. It was a sixteen-foot bass boat, white with a red stripe, and it had belonged to her grandfather, who had died when Maeve was five. She had a single memory of him, a big laughing man in a mesh cap who had smelled like cigarettes and who had let her sit on his lap and steer the boat across the reservoir while he worked the throttle. After he died, the boat had come to her father, and her father had towed it home and put it in the side yard and never once, in eleven years, put it in the water.
The tarp was off now. It lay in a heap on the grass. Her father stood beside the boat in a T-shirt with a flashlight in one hand and his phone in the other, taking pictures of the engine.
She stopped at the edge of the driveway. He saw her and lowered the phone.
"Hey," he said.
"Hey."
He looked at the boat. She looked at the boat. A moth landed on the windshield and walked slowly across it.
"I called Tara," he said. "Told her I'd be late with it. Told her why. Well. Told her some of why."
"What did she say?"
"Said she'd hold Kenzie's spot till Wednesday. Said three other families asked for extensions this year and she didn't tell anybody about it." He laughed, short, without much in it. "Guess I'm not the only guy in a work shirt."