"You had a shoebox." Walter put the form back on the table and squared its edges with two fingers. "I've seen you carry three bags of groceries and a laundry basket up those stairs when the elevator was out. You had a shoebox."
"Mom," Jalen said, "it's fine, I can—"
"Don't," Renita said, without looking at him. Then, to Walter: "It's two nights. Out of state. On a bus with I don't know how many kids and one science teacher."
"Three chaperones," Dez said. "It's on the back."
"It's two hundred and forty dollars the same week Jalen's summer deposit is due."
"That's a reason," Walter said. "That's a real reason. Is that the reason?"
She looked at him then, really looked. In the lamplight, with the dish towel over his shoulder, he could have been forty, and she could have been nine, sitting at the top of the basement stairs in the house on Glide Street listening to the lathe run past midnight.
"We're not doing this in front of the boys," she said.
"Then when are we doing it? Later?" He put a weight on the word that made Dez's face go still. "When is it due?"
"Friday," Dez said. "Eight a.m. Ms. Sato has to put the roster in by nine. If my form's not in she has to drop me and take the alternate."
"Who's the alternate?"
"Nobody. There isn't one. Hector's cousin said he'd go, but he doesn't know the code."
"So they'd go short a driver."
"They'd go short a programmer," Dez said. "I'm both."
Walter turned back to his daughter and didn't say anything more, which was worse than anything he could have said.
Renita picked her phone up off the kitchen counter. She had a shift tomorrow at six-thirty. She ran the surgical scheduling board for eleven operating rooms at Strong Memorial. She had a headache coming on behind her left eye. She had imagined tonight differently. She'd pictured herself at the window afterward with a cup of tea, feeling for half an hour like a woman who'd managed things.
"I'll think about it," she said. "I said later and I meant later. I'm not signing anything tonight with my father standing over me like a foreman."