"Have you used tonight?"
Shelby didn't answer for a long moment. Then she reached into the pocket of her sweatpants and took out a small square of folded tinfoil and set it on the bench between them, in the three feet of concrete. She put it down carefully, the way you'd set down something that might go off.
"Kyle Pruitt," she said. "You remember Kyle? From Pruett Street. Pruitt from Pruett, we used to call him. I called him from the pay phone at the gas station across from Cedar Hollow. There's still a pay phone there. Can you believe it? I think they leave it there on purpose. Like a test." She stared at the foil. "He picked me up. He gave me that. He wanted to stay, and I made him leave. I've been sitting here for three hours looking at it."
"You haven't opened it."
"I haven't opened it." Shelby's voice shook. "I keep thinking, if I open it, I'll be dead or I'll be Mom, and I don't know which one's worse. And then I keep thinking, I'm already Mom. So what's the difference."
"You are not Mom."
"I took your money," Shelby said.
Kristen went still.
"I didn't know. I swear to God I didn't know, Kris. He told me it was his. He said he had a separate account from before you got married, from when he was still competing, and it was just sitting there. He said it was his to give." Shelby's face crumpled. "Today the billing lady called me into her office to sign something for the last week, and the account on the paperwork said Brock and Kristen Dahl. Joint. And she was being so nice about it, she said, Your sister and brother-in-law must love you very much, and I just sat there. I just sat there and smiled."
She was crying now, hard and almost silently, her shoulders shaking inside the borrowed jacket.
"Do you remember the coffee can?" Shelby said. "Your tip money. From the Waffle Barn. You kept it in the coffee can behind the flour, and you were saving for that car, and you had almost seven hundred dollars, and Mom found it."
"I remember."
"I watched her take it. Did you know that? I was ten. I was in the hall and I saw her standing at the counter with the can, counting it, and she saw me watching and she put her finger to her lips. Like it was a game. Like it was our secret." Shelby pressed the heels of her hands into her eyes. "And I never told you. I let you think you'd lost it, or that someone broke in. You cried in the bathroom for an hour. I heard you. And today I sat in that office and I thought, I'm doing it. I'm standing at the counter with the can."
The spillway roared. Kristen looked out over the black water, at the faint line of white where it went over the concrete lip and fell. She had known about the coffee can. She had known it was their mother. She had never known Shelby saw.