He reached into the jar and took out the bills. He did it carefully; he didn't crumple them. He took out the twenties she had laid on the bottom, all facing the same way, and the tens, and he started thumbing through them with the quick, practiced count of a man who handled cash at the service desk every day.
"I need eleven-fifty," he said, mostly to himself. "Eleven-fifty, and then there's the hotel incidentals, and food on the road, so call it twelve."
"That's all of it," Maeve said. "That's everything. That's the whole jar."
"I'll leave you the change."
He meant the coins in the sandwich bag. Maeve stared at him. She felt as though the floor of the kitchen had tilted a little, the way the floor of the Dairy Dip did when she had been on her feet for nine hours, and she put her palm flat on the cold counter to hold it still.
The side door opened.
***
Nobody had heard the car. Grandma Bev drove a 2009 Buick LeSabre that was so quiet it seemed to float, and she always parked on the street rather than block the driveway, and she always came in through the side door without knocking because, as she said, she had paid for half that door in 2004 and she would knock on it when she was dead.
She came into the kitchen carrying a brown paper grocery bag against her hip. It was Thursday; she brought groceries on Thursdays. She was seventy-one years old and stood about five foot two, with short gray hair in tight curls she had set every Saturday morning at the same salon since 1979, and glasses with thin gold frames, and a blue cardigan sweater buttoned all the way up though it was eighty degrees outside. She had been a bookkeeper at Marlow Lumber and Supply for thirty-one years. She had the face of a woman who had found a great many errors in a great many columns, and had circled every one of them in red.
She looked at her son standing at the kitchen island with his granddaughter's money in his hands. She looked at the empty jar. She looked at Maeve, with her palm flat on the counter and her face white as paper.
"What are you doing with that jar?" she said.
Her father's face did a thing Maeve had seen only a handful of times: it went young. For one second he looked like a boy who had been caught. Then it closed over.
"Hi, Mom. Didn't hear you come in."
"I asked you a question, Douglas."
"It's nothing. It's a family thing. We've got it handled." He folded the bills once, neatly, and started to slide them into his back pocket. "Kenzie's trip money came up short and Maeve offered to help with the trip. That's all. She offered to help out her sister."