Steinkamp: forty years telling airplanes where to go, now he just watched the sky out of habit. The hits were good, clean bruises, nine and eleven and ten in the test squares, and Barrett wrote the slope and moved to the east face and wrote that too. It was a clear morning and the wind came across the flat country from the west the way it always did, with nothing to stop it between here and Colorado, and he could see a long way from up there: the water tower, the grain elevator by the tracks, the cars moving on K-15 like beads on a wire.
He thought about his mother's handwriting. He thought about Leti's hand on Itzel's shoulder in the driveway in July.
At lunch he sat in his truck in the parking lot of a Braum's and looked things up on his phone. Prairie Fire Volleyball Club had its fees posted on its website, under a picture of girls in red jerseys piled on top of one another holding a trophy, and the seventeens Gold team was forty-one hundred and fifty dollars for the season, not counting travel or uniforms or the mandatory parent fundraising commitment. His mother had rounded up by fifty. The Arts Center listed its youth pottery series at three hundred and forty dollars for twelve weeks, and Amparo was in her second series. He did not look up the trampoline park. He did not need to. He had been at the party, standing at the edge of the foam pit holding a paper plate of pizza, watching twelve eight-year-olds hurl themselves into a pool of blue cubes, and he had thought that it must have been expensive and then he had thought, well, Efraín, and that had been the end of it.
He opened the banking app.
He knew what he would find before it loaded, and he found it. Their joint checking held what it always held at the middle of a month, a little over three thousand dollars, enough for the mortgage on the first and the utilities after. The savings account they called the roof fund, which had started three years ago as the honeymoon fund and become the roof fund the spring the wind took half the shingles off the south side, held sixteen thousand four hundred and nine dollars and twelve cents. He scrolled back through six months of it. Two deposits a month, his and hers, the same amounts every time. No withdrawals. Not one. Leti had not taken a dollar from the roof.
He had expected to be relieved and was not. He sat in the truck with a cup of Braum's coffee going cold in the holder and the engine off and felt something cold settle into him instead, because if she had taken it from the roof