He thought about other things then, a lot of them at once, the way you see a whole street in a lightning flash. He thought about the first time he'd come home and found Junie's bed in the laundry room and Dana's arms around his waist, she picked it, didn't you, hon. He thought about Junie on the phone every Sunday night for three years, her voice always a little too cheerful and the calls always ending fast, gotta go, Dad, Dana needs me, love you. He thought about last Labor Day when he'd gotten home a day early and found Junie eating cereal for dinner standing up at the counter while the other three ate takeout from the Thai place in the den, and he'd said, "Bug, you don't want pad thai?" and she'd said she wasn't hungry, and Dana had said, from the den, "She's on some kind of diet, I don't know, I can't keep up," and he had let it go. He had let it go. He thought about how thin Junie had looked at Christmas. He thought about how she'd stopped talking about her mother. He thought about the money.
The money. He stood very still in the road.
When Rose died there had been a life insurance policy through her job at the county extension office, not big, but not nothing. Ninety-one thousand dollars after the funeral. He had put it in a savings account at Corbin State Bank and named it, in the bank's online system, ROSE FOR JUNIE, because he could not stand to call it anything else. College. A car. A wedding. Whatever Junie needed, later, when she was grown and Rose was not there to give it to her. He had not touched it in five years. When he married Dana he'd added her to the household accounts, because she ran the house and he was gone three weeks out of four, and she'd needed to pay for things. She'd needed access. That was reasonable. Everything she asked for was always so reasonable.
Last fall, on a Sunday call, Dana had mentioned that Junie needed braces. Thirty-eight hundred dollars, some kind of bite problem, the orthodontist said it would get worse. She'd taken it out of Rose's fund, she said, because it was for Junie, wasn't it? It seemed right. He had said yes, of course. He had been in Louisiana. He had been so tired.
At Christmas Junie had smiled at him over the turkey, and her teeth had looked exactly the same as they always had. No wires. No brackets. He had noticed. He had noticed and thought, huh, maybe they're the invisible kind, and asked nothing, because asking would have meant a conversation, and the conversation would have meant a fight, and he was home for six days and he wanted six days of peace.
He opened his banking app with his thumb. It took two tries to get the password right.
ROSE FOR JUNIE. The balance was forty-four thousand, one hundred and twelve dollars.
He scrolled. He scrolled for a long time.
Transfers to the household checking account. Fifteen hundred. Two thousand. Eight hundred. Twenty-two hundred. Every few weeks, going back two and a half years. Never so much at once that it would ping an alert. And from the household account, when he went and looked: Wichita Cheer Elite. Bellagrace Boutique. A Nordstrom charge. A charge for something called Halo Med Spa. A payment to a car dealership in Derby, the down payment on the white Acura that Kenzie drove to school and that Dana had told him her ex-husband had bought for Kenzie's seventeenth birthday. And at the very top, from Wednesday: Bellagrace Boutique, $640.00. Bellagrace Boutique, $485.00.
Two dresses. He knew what they were without asking.
"Hale." Hollis had a hand on his shoulder now. "Talk to me. Somebody die?"
"No," Mark said. And then, because Hollis had been his foreman for six years, had been there the week Rose died and had driven him home from the hospital and had sat in his truck in the driveway with him for two hours in the dark without saying a single word, he turned the phone around and showed him the photo of the sink.
Hollis looked at it for a long time.
"That's your girl's?"