"You show up early," Maeve said. "You don't look at your phone. You do the boring part without anybody asking. And you don't act like they owe you."
Kenzie nodded slowly, as if memorizing it.
"Okay," she said. Then, after a moment: "Can I earn more? Like, do you think I could? If I did that?"
It was not an apology. Maeve knew it was not. It was something smaller and harder to name, a twelve-year-old picking up a sentence she had once thrown at someone and turning it over in her hands to see what it actually weighed. Maeve thought about saying something sharp. It would have been easy. It would have been fair.
"Yeah," she said instead. "You can earn more. It just takes a while."
Kenzie went back to the living room. Maeve finished counting. Forty-seven dollars, the most in a single week since August. She was writing the number on the back of an envelope when her father came in from the garage and stopped at the edge of the light.
He looked at the jar. He looked at her.
For a second she braced, the old tightening low in her stomach. She would wonder, for years, whether he noticed that. Whether he saw her brace.
"How much?" he said.
"Forty-seven this week."
He nodded. He seemed about to say something else. He rubbed the back of his neck. Then he said, "That's good, Maeve. That's real good," and went to the refrigerator and stood in its light for a while and took out a beer, and on his way out of the kitchen he stopped, just for a moment, in front of the printout still stuck in the center of the refrigerator door under the lobster magnet, and read it. She watched him read it all the way to the bottom.
Then he went into the living room, where Kenzie had the television on, and sat down in his recliner, and Maeve heard him ask her sister about practice.
She screwed the lid back on the jar. She set it on top of her textbooks, where it belonged. The faucet dripped, once, and then the long wait, and then once more. Nobody had fixed that yet.
She didn't forgive him that night. She wasn't sure when she would, or whether forgiveness was even the right word for whatever might come later. But the light was on, and the money was hers, and somewhere at the Marlow Community Credit Union, in a little blue book in her grandmother's purse, every dollar of it had a twin.
That would have to be enough for now. For now, it almost was.