The man from Findlay came on Sunday. The engine turned over on the fourth try, coughing blue smoke across the side yard, and he paid thirteen hundred and fifty dollars in cash after twenty minutes of haggling, and towed the boat away behind a black pickup with a Buckeyes plate. Maeve watched from her window. Her father stood in the driveway and watched it go all the way down the street and around the corner by the Methodist church, and then he stood a while longer, looking at the empty corner, before he came in.
That afternoon Kenzie went into his room and came out without the envelope she'd carried in. Maeve knew about the envelope because she knew where Kenzie kept it, in the back of her underwear drawer, the way Maeve herself had kept things at that age: birthday money, a hundred and eighty dollars, two years of it, the twenty from Aunt Shelly and the fifty from their mother in Tucson and the hundred from Grandma Bev and a ten from God knew where.
Maeve didn't say anything about it. Kenzie didn't either. But at dinner that night, which was frozen pizza, eaten mostly in silence, their father looked across the table at Kenzie for a long time, with an expression Maeve couldn't read, and then said, "You didn't have to do that, Kenz."
Kenzie shrugged, eyes on her plate. "It's my trip."
***
They left for Orlando the following Thursday, at four-forty in the morning, in a convoy of SUVs from the high school parking lot.
Maeve was asleep when Kenzie came into her room. She woke because someone was standing beside the bed, and she opened her eyes and saw her sister in the dark, already in her warm-up jacket, red with yellow piping, the bow already in her hair, glinting faintly in the light from the hall.
"Hey," Kenzie whispered. "We're leaving."
"Okay." Maeve's voice was thick. "Have fun."
"It's on a livestream. Saturday at two. Our division. It's on the website. I'll text you the link."
"Okay."
Kenzie hesitated. "Will you watch?"
Maeve lay there and thought about the kitchen, the doorway, the light, easy voice. You can earn more. She thought about the shaking shoulders on her bedroom floor. She thought about the envelope going into her father's room and not coming out.
"Maybe," she said. "I'm working."
"Okay." Kenzie nodded, as if that, too, were a fair answer. She stood there a moment more. Then she bent down quickly and put her arms around Maeve's neck, awkwardly, sideways, the way she used to during thunderstorms, and let go before Maeve could decide what to do about it, and was gone.