Something moved across her father's face, quick, and was gone.
"That's not fair," he said.
From the doorway, Kenzie said, "You can earn more."
She said it lightly. She was leaning against the doorframe with her arms folded, one white sneaker crossed over the other, bouncing a little on her toes the way she always did, as if she might have to tumble at any moment. She said it the way you'd tell someone they had something in their teeth. It wasn't even cruel, exactly. That was what Maeve would remember. It was worse than cruel. It was easy.
"You can earn more," Kenzie said again, when nobody answered. "You have, like, a whole year until it starts. The trip is next weekend. Everybody's going. Madison's going, and Brooklyn's going, and if I don't go then the pyramid doesn't work, because I'm the flyer, so it's not just me, it's the whole team. Coach Tara said."
"Kenzie," their father said, but gently. He always said her name gently.
"Well, it's true."
Maeve looked at her sister. She thought about the day Kenzie was born, when Maeve was four and had been allowed to hold her in the hospital, propped up with pillows, and Kenzie had wrapped her whole hand around Maeve's finger and Maeve had decided right then that she would protect her from everything. She thought about the year their mother left, when Kenzie was seven and wet the bed every night for three months, and how Maeve had gotten up at two in the morning and changed the sheets and never told anyone, not even their father, because Kenzie had begged her not to. She thought about how Kenzie used to climb into her bed during thunderstorms. Kenzie hadn't done that in two years. Somewhere in there, without anyone deciding it, Kenzie had become the one who got things and Maeve had become the one who managed.
"It's not your money," Maeve said to her.
"It's family money," Kenzie said. "Dad said."
Their father reached across the island and picked up the jar.
Maeve did not grab it. Afterward she would wonder why. She was close enough. She could have put both hands on it. But there was something in her, very old, that did not know how to grab things away from him. She watched his thick, scarred fingers, a mechanic's fingers still, though he had been in the office for six years, close around the red lid and twist. The lid made a small dry sound coming loose.
"Dad. Don't."
"Family helps family," he said.
He said it the way he had always said it. He had said it when he made her give Kenzie her bedroom, the bigger one, the one with the window seat, because Kenzie needed room to practice her jumps. He had said it when Maeve's birthday money from Grandma Bev went to new cheer shoes because Kenzie's had worn through at the toe and the regional was that weekend. Family helps family. It was a phrase that only ever moved in one direction. It was a phrase, Maeve had begun to understand, that meant you help, and the family is helped.