Done in Fifteen Years novel · Chapter 2 of 32

Chapter 2: Three Hundred and Twelve Dollars

Raylene tells Macey the truth on the road west, her cards are frozen and Doreen's voicemail is vicious, and at dawn someone knocks on the motel door with a delivery.

I didn't take my foot off the gas until the courthouse dome was gone from the mirror.

The gray pickup didn't follow.

I checked every mirror for ten miles anyway.

Macey sat with her backpack in her lap and both hands flat on top of it.

She didn't say anything until we passed the feed store at the county line.

"Mom."

"Yeah."

"That man had an envelope."

"I saw."

"Were you just on TV telling Grandma Doreen to light her own fire?"

"I was."

"Okay." She nodded slowly. "Okay. I need the whole thing. Not the mom version."

So I gave her the whole thing.

I gave her the folder, the note and the pink highlighter, start to finish.

Fifteen years on Friday, and if nobody put papers in my hand before then, half of the family's share was mine.

Macey listened with her mouth open, which showed every band on her braces.

"So that guy was trying to serve you."

"Yes."

"And if he touches you with the envelope, you lose."

"It doesn't work like tag, baby."

"It kind of works like tag."

I thought about it.

"It kind of works like tag," I said.

She turned to look out the back window, then faced front again.

"Dad called you the help."

"He did."

"In front of the Lone Pine people."

"He did."

She was quiet for a mile.

"He calls me 'the register,'" she said. "Like, 'Put the register on the front.' I'm a whole person."

I reached over and squeezed her knee.

She let me, which she hadn't done since she was eleven.

We hit Kerrville at three and kept going west.

At Junction the gas light came on.

I pulled up to a pump at a truck stop and slid the company card into the reader.

DECLINED.

I tried it again.

DECLINED. SEE CASHIER.

I tried my debit card, the one on the account Darrell called ours.

DECLINED.

Macey watched me through the windshield with her chin on her fist.

I went in and paid the cashier sixty dollars from the coffee can, in fives and ones.

She counted it twice and looked at me.

Back in the truck, my phone buzzed on the dash.

One voicemail.

Doreen.

I should have deleted it.

I put it on speaker instead, because some part of me still needed to hear it.

"Raylene, honey."

Her voice was sweet as a pecan pie.

"You've had your little moment, and the TV people got their footage. Now you're going to bring my granddaughter home before supper."

A pause, and the clink of ice in a glass.

"You were a fry cook with a nice face. That's all you ever were. The face won't last, and the frying, well. We've got people for that. Come home and we'll talk about something fair."

The message ended.

Macey stared at the phone.

"Grandma Doreen said frying, well," she said.

"She did."

"Like, with a pause."

"I heard it."

"Mom, she sounds like a villain in a movie where the villain gets eaten by a crocodile."

I laughed so hard I had to put my forehead on the steering wheel.

Macey laughed too, and then she started crying a little, and then she laughed again.

When we were done, I wiped my face with the back of my wrist and looked at the dashboard clock.

It was 4:12 on Saturday afternoon.

Midnight Thursday was five days and eight hours away.

I'd stood at a pit for eighteen hours straight more times than I could count.

I could stand anywhere for five days.

"Here's the plan," I said.

"There's a plan?"

"There's a plan now. We don't get served until Friday."

"Where do we go?"

"West. Somewhere nobody's ever heard of Kilgore's."

"That's nowhere, Mom. They have billboards in Mexico."

"Then somewhere they don't read billboards."

The motel on the east side of Junction had a sign that said CLEAN ROOMS and a parking lot full of deer hunters' trailers.

The room was sixty-nine dollars cash.

It had one bed, a lamp shaped like a cactus and a picture of a different cactus over the TV.

Macey flopped face first on the bedspread.

"This is the best place I've ever been," she said into it.

We ate peanut butter crackers and gas station beef jerky for supper.

She asked what was in the jerky.

I told her she didn't want to know, and she ate four more.

I counted the coffee can on the bedspread.

One hundred and eighty-three dollars.

Macey watched me count.

"Is that all of it?"

"That's all of it."

"Okay." She pulled the blanket over her shoulder. "I've got twenty-two from my birthday. That makes it two hundred and five."

She was asleep in four minutes.

She snored like her granddaddy had, the man who'd taught me to build a fire.

I lay on the outside edge of the bed in my clothes, with my boots on the floor where I could find them.

Every set of headlights in the lot went across the ceiling.

I didn't sleep.

At six o'clock the sky behind the curtain was gray.

Somebody knocked on the door.

Three knocks, polite and patient.

"Mrs. Kilgore?" a man's voice said through the door. "Got a delivery for you."

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