Kiet looked at the bag, and at the door, and at his phone. "Text me when it's in," he said. "Seriously. I'm not going to sleep till you do."
"You're not going to sleep anyway. Your baby is sick."
"Then I'll be awake to read it."
Lorenz said he would text, and Kiet went back into the office to put the bank and the log into the safe, and Lorenz heard the dial spin and the bolt throw and the soft heavy click of the door, which was a sound he loved, a sound like a promise kept. Lorenz went to the coat hooks by the office and got his jacket. It was a black canvas work jacket with a corduroy collar that he had bought at the Farm and Fleet the first winter, when he had found out what an Indiana January was and had stood at the bus stop on Rudisill with his ears burning so badly he thought they would fall off. The jacket was too big, which was why he liked it. The deposit bag fit flat against his ribs in the big inside pocket, and he zipped the jacket over it, and then he put his hand to his chest the way he always did, to feel it there, and his fingers found the other thing in the pocket too, the plain white envelope folded in half, and he remembered.
Six hundred and forty dollars. His own money. Six hundred and forty, in twenties, and on the front of the envelope in his own handwriting, in blue ballpoint: PARA KAY NANAY — CELING DIMACULANGAN — OKT. He had cashed his paycheck at the check-cashing place on Calhoun on his way in at two o'clock, the way he did on the eighth of every month, so that he could stop at the padala shop in the strip mall on Lima Road on his way home in the morning and send it. His mother was seventy-six and lived with his sister in Angeles City, an hour from Guagua, and three times a week she went to a dialysis center on MacArthur Highway, and each session cost two thousand nine hundred pesos, and PhilHealth covered some of it and his sister's husband covered some of it and the rest was Lorenz. It was always Lorenz. He had been sending money home since he was twenty-two, and he had long ago stopped feeling the envelope in his pocket, the same way he had stopped smelling the sisig.
He thought, for one second, about leaving it in the office. Putting it in the safe. But the safe was for the restaurant, and anyway Kiet had already locked it, and the padala shop opened at nine, and the envelope had ridden in that pocket on the eighth of every month for six years without anything happening to it.
He left it where it was. That was a decision he would think about for a long time afterward. Not because it was a bad decision. Because of how small it was.
"Ready?" Kiet said, coming out of the office with his own coat on and his phone in his hand.
"Ready."
They went out the back together, the way Dorrit wanted, and Kiet locked the steel door behind them and pulled on it twice, and they stood for a moment in the alley under the yellow security light, breathing out clouds. It was colder than Lorenz had expected. The time-and-temperature sign at the gas station on the corner had said forty-one when he came in that afternoon and it was lower now, thirty-something, and the sky over the alley was black and full of stars, more stars than you usually saw in town, sharp and hard as salt.
"Text me," Kiet said.