Maeve kept counting. Eighty-one. Eighty-two. Eighty-three.
Her father came into the kitchen and stopped. She could feel him stop. He was not a large man, but he moved like one; he had played linebacker at Marlow High twenty-eight years ago, and he still walked as if there were someone he needed to keep from getting past him. He wore what he wore every day to the dealership, a long-sleeved collared shirt in a color that was not quite gray and not quite brown, the sleeves rolled once at the cuff. His hair was short and brown and going thin at the crown in a way he checked sometimes in the microwave door when he thought nobody saw.
"What's all this," he said.
"Money." She wrote eighty-three on the envelope and kept going. "Eighty-four."
"I can see it's money."
"Then why'd you ask?"
It came out sharper than she meant. She was tired. She had worked the lunch shift and then come home and showered and still smelled like the fryer. But she heard him breathe in through his nose, a long breath, the one that meant he was choosing not to say something, and she felt the old familiar tightening low in her stomach.
"Sorry," she said. "I'm counting. I lose my place."
He came around the end of the island and opened the refrigerator and stood in its light for a while. She counted the rest of the ones in the white glow of it. One hundred and ninety-two.
Five hundred and twenty, plus three hundred and ten, plus one hundred and ninety, plus one hundred and ninety-two.
One thousand, two hundred and twelve dollars.
She did it again to be sure. It came out the same. Then she pulled the masking tape on the side of the jar toward her and looked at the last number written there, in her grandmother's square, slanting bookkeeper's hand: 8/24 — $1,108. Under it, in the space below, Maeve wrote in pencil, small: 8/28 — $1,212. Tomorrow was Friday. Tomorrow was the day.
She started putting the money back in the jar, in order, twenties on the bottom.
Her father shut the refrigerator without taking anything out of it.
"That's a lot of money, Maeve," he said.
"It's for my summer program."