The cashier's check for ten thousand four hundred and twelve dollars and eighty cents was drawn on the fourteenth of April at the North Shore branch of her credit union, which was really just a long beige room in a strip mall near the Miller Hill Mall with a sun-faded poster of a loon. Nora brought the baby with her in a carrier on her chest, because there was no one else to watch her, and she stood at the counter and waited while the teller, a young man with a careful mustache, printed the check and counted the zeroes twice.
"Memo line?" he asked.
She thought about it. "Loan number," she said, and read it off the letter. Then, after a moment: "And put Linnea."
He looked at her curiously, but he did it.
When she turned around, Ruth Halvorsen was standing in line behind her, holding a deposit envelope from the Ladies' Aid bake sale.
There was no way around it. Ruth had seen the check. Ruth had seen the servicer's name on the letter in Nora's hand, because Ruth had sharp eyes and had spent forty years reading other people's correspondence over the rim of her glasses at the church office. And Ruth had heard the number. Everyone in the credit union had heard the number. The teller had read it aloud twice.
They walked out to the parking lot together. The snow was gray and pocked with April. Linnea had fallen asleep against Nora's chest, her mouth open, a tiny fist curled in the strap of the carrier.
"That's his house payment," Ruth said.
"Ruth—"
"That's a great deal of money for a house payment. That's months of house payment." She stopped beside Nora's car and looked at her with an expression Nora could not read. "Is my son losing his house?"
Nora thought of Daniel at the kitchen table with his face in his hands, saying please. She thought of a promise made on yellow legal paper.
"He asked me not to tell anyone," she said. "I'm asking you not to tell him you know. Please. He's trying very hard. If he finds out you saw this, I think it would—" She stopped. "I think it would break something in him that he needs right now."
Ruth looked at her for a long time. Then she looked at the baby. She reached out one gloved hand and tucked the edge of the knitted hat down over Linnea's ear, where it had ridden up.
"His father was like that," she said. "Would rather drown than ask anyone to throw him a rope." She took her hand away. "All right. I won't say anything to him. But I'm not going to pretend I didn't see it. Not to you."
"That's fair."