"That's two hundred," she said. "Fifty-eight hundred to go."
"I know what the math is, Mom."
"I'm just saying it out loud. So it's real."
"It's real," her father said. "Every month. Till it's done."
She snapped the purse shut. She didn't thank him, and she didn't say she forgave him, and he didn't ask her to. But she stayed for dinner that night, for the first time since August, and she and Kenzie argued companionably about whether cheerleading was a sport, and at one point her father laughed at something his mother said, a real laugh, surprised out of him. Maeve, clearing plates, heard it and kept her back turned so nobody would see her face.
***
In October, the light over the kitchen island came back on.
Maeve came home from school on a Tuesday and it was simply on, bright and yellow and a little too harsh, shining down on the scarred wood of the counter as if it had never been out at all. There was a new bulb box in the recycling bin and a smudge of drywall dust on the floor under the fixture, where someone had had to take the whole housing down to get at the socket. Nobody mentioned it. Her father didn't say, I fixed the light. She didn't say, Thank you. It just stayed on, every evening, and she noticed it every evening, and that was all.
She started a new jar that week. Not a pickle jar this time; a mason jar, smaller, that Grandma Bev brought over with a strip of masking tape already on it and, written at the top in square slanting capitals, BUS + BOOKS + SPENDING. The Dairy Dip was closed until spring, so the money came from babysitting the Lindgren twins on Saturday nights and tutoring a freshman in algebra on Wednesdays, and it came slowly, ten and twenty dollars at a time. Grandma Bev still matched it. Every Sunday Maeve counted it at the island, under the new light, and called her grandmother with the number, and her grandmother wrote it on the tape the following Thursday.
Kenzie started a jar, too. It appeared on the windowsill over the sink one afternoon, an old peanut butter jar with the label half peeled off and a piece of notebook paper taped to it that said SPARKS SPRING SEASON in red marker, with a lopsided star. There were six dollars in it. Then eleven. Then, after Kenzie had spent two Saturdays raking the Petersons' yard across the street, thirty-one.
Maeve noticed it and said nothing for a week. Then one evening Kenzie came into the kitchen while Maeve was counting and stood at the end of the island, bouncing on her toes, watching.
"How do you get people to hire you?" she said.
"For what?"
"For anything. Babysitting. The Petersons said they'd only pay me once more because I got leaves in their gutter."
Maeve looked at her sister. Kenzie looked back, chin up, waiting, a little defiant and a little embarrassed. She was wearing her uniform. Of course she was.