"You said you'd ask her."
"Ask me what," Maeve said again.
Her father put his hands flat on the island, on the other side of it from her, so that the jar stood between them. He looked at her, and he looked at the jar, and when he spoke his voice was very reasonable. That was the worst of it, later, when she thought about it at night. How reasonable he sounded.
"Give me the money," he said.
For a second she thought she had misheard him. The faucet dripped. Somewhere in the living room, the television was selling a set of knives.
"What?"
"I need you to give me the money. Not all of it. Most of it." He was already talking faster, the way he did when he had decided something on the drive home and rehearsed it at red lights. "Your sister needs it for her cheer trip. The balance for Orlando is due tomorrow, and I'm short. I'm short because of the truck, you know about the truck, that transmission was twenty-nine hundred dollars, and Halvorsen cut everybody's overtime in July, so I'm short. It's temporary. I'll pay you back."
"Pay me back when?"
"When I can."
"The deposit is due tomorrow."
"So you'll call them. You'll explain. Places like that, they have hardship stuff, they work with people."
"They don't," Maeve said. "I read the whole thing. It says if the commitment deposit isn't received by five p.m. on August twenty-ninth, the spot goes to the waitlist. That's what it says. I printed it out." It was on the refrigerator, actually, under a magnet shaped like a lobster, half-covered by Kenzie's competition schedule. She had put it up in March. He had walked past it every day for five months. "I've had a countdown on my phone since June."
"Maeve."
"I worked all summer for that."
"I know you did."
"No, you don't. You don't know. You were never there. You never came by once." Her voice cracked and she hated it, and she pushed through it. "Gil asked me in July if I even had parents."