Chapter 14: The Workshop

By nine that night I was back in Dayton, in my father's garage, with a tin box open on his workbench.

My mother had booked two seats before I finished my sentence.

She hadn't asked what happened at Meridian.

She had looked at my face and gone to pack.

The garage smelled the way it always had, of cut pine and machine oil.

When we sold the shop, Peggy kept the bench and the radio that only got one station.

She put the tin box down in front of me now, and a glass of milk beside it.

"Your father's bank papers," she said. "The ones from the year you sold."

"Why did you keep them?"

"Because I knew one day you'd need to look at what you did."

She went into the house and left the porch light on.

I read the statements under the bench lamp.

Six wires, over eleven months.

Sixty thousand. Fifty-five. Fifty. Sixty-five. Sixty. Fifty.

Every one went to an account called *LW Music LLC.*

Every memo line held the same words, in Lena's own hand on the transfer form: *thank you, my love.*

I added them up twice.

Three hundred and forty thousand dollars, and a workshop my father spent forty years in.

My phone buzzed on the bench.

It was a text from Lena.

*Come home, baby. I'm sorry about all the noise. Sign Friday and you can sit in the front row Saturday. I'll even say your name.*

Under it was a photo of the thousand white roses.

I looked at it for a long time.

Then I blocked her number, and I did it slowly, so I would remember doing it.

I was still sitting there at two in the morning when headlights swung across the garage door.

The engine cut out.

A car door shut, quietly.

Maura stood in the open doorway in her black blazer, with a rental key in one hand and a paper bag in the other.

She had not slept since Meridian.

"I told you not to follow me," I said.

"I know."

"Then why are you here?"

"Because I'm not following you," Maura said. "I'm bringing you something."

She came in and set the bag on the bench, next to my father's bank papers.

Out of it she took a copy of the staff agreement, the one with a lawyer's note in the margin in red: *DO NOT SIGN.*

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