"I don't ride it." He pushed the bag a little closer to me. "I looked it up. There's a phone at Walmart, it's a Motorola, it's a hundred and eighty-nine. If you could do the rest. I'd pay you back. I could do the Vandersloots' gutters, they asked."
I looked at the bag of money. I looked at my son, who hadn't asked me for anything in a year, who'd sold the bike he'd begged for when he was twelve.
And I said, "No."
I said it gently. I want credit for that, if I get credit for anything. I said, "Honey, no. Not right now." I said, "Your sister's phone is a medical thing. That has to come first. You understand that." He nodded. He understood that. "And," I said, "and I'm going to be honest with you. Until your grades come up, until you start sleeping at night, I'm not putting a new phone in your hands. I'm just not. That phone is not good for you, Kel. Whatever you're doing on it at three in the morning, it's not good for you."
"It's not for games," he said.
"Then what is it for?"
He opened his mouth. And then he closed it. And he looked — not at me — down the hall, toward the stairs, where Juniper was sitting on the bottom step with her chin on her knees and her vest zipped up to her nose, watching us both. I hadn't known she was there. I turned around in my chair and she looked at me and then she got up and went upstairs fast, her socks thumping on the carpet.
When I turned back, Kellan had picked up his bag of money.
"Okay," he said. "Forget it."
"Kel —"
"It's fine. I'll keep the sock on it."
He went upstairs. A minute later I heard the knock: two short and a long.