So every Sunday she had counted, and every Sunday Grandma Bev had written the number on the tape in her square slanting hand and then, on Monday morning, driven the Buick to the credit union on Main Street and stood in line and deposited the match in cash, because she did not trust apps. She kept the passbook in her purse. She had shown it to Maeve once in July, a little blue booklet with a column of entries, each one stamped, each one equal to the number on the tape. Maeve had looked at it and understood, for the first time, that money could be a promise someone kept.
She thought about that passbook now, watching her father's hand.
He brought it out from behind his back.
He did it slowly, the way you'd hand over a set of keys at a traffic stop. He did not look at his mother. He did not look at Maeve. He looked at the jar. He laid the folded bills on the counter, beside it, and unfolded them, and Maeve saw that he had already pulled the ones out and set them aside, keeping only the twenties and tens and fives, the clean money, and somehow that detail was the one that made her eyes sting.
"All of it," Grandma Bev said.
He reached into his shirt pocket and took out three more twenties that Maeve hadn't even seen him palm. He put them on the pile.
Her grandmother picked up the money and counted it. She did not count the way Maeve did, laying each bill down; she counted the way a teller counts, fanning the bills in one hand and flicking them with the thumb of the other, fast, her lips moving. She counted it twice. Then she looked at the tape on the jar, at Maeve's penciled number, and back at the money.
"Twelve hundred and twelve," she said.
"I told you I'd leave the change," her father said, to nobody.
Grandma Bev put the money back in the jar herself, twenties on the bottom, the way Maeve did, as if she knew. She screwed on the lid. She held the jar out to Maeve, and Maeve took it in both arms and held it against the Turkey Trot logo on her chest, and felt how heavy and stupid and ordinary it was, a pickle jar full of soft dollar bills, and how she would have died rather than let it go again.
"Go put that in your room," her grandmother said. "Shut the door. Your father and I are going to talk."
***
She did put it in her room. She did shut the door. She did not stay there.
Her room was the small one at the back of the house, over the garage, the one that had been a sewing room when her mother lived here. The window looked down on the driveway. It was open, because the house had no central air and the window unit in Maeve's room had died in July along with the kitchen light and the garage door spring and, she sometimes thought, everything else. She sat on the floor beneath it with her back against the wall and the jar between her knees, and she listened.
They had gone outside. Her father had said, in the kitchen, "Not in front of the girls," and Grandma Bev had said, "Fine," in a voice like a door closing, and they had gone out through the mudroom and stood in the driveway by her father's truck, which was the reason for all of this, or one of them. Maeve could see the tops of their heads. The streetlight at the end of the drive had come on, and moths were batting at it.