Chapter 23: The Pennock Kitchen

Kayla stood outside the iron gate of the Home in her red dress, with both hands wrapped around an envelope.

She had not come in.

I walked down the drive with flour on my forearms and my hair coming loose, and I stopped on my side of the bars.

"I work doubles at a diner on Detroit Avenue," she said, before I could speak. "Breakfast and the dinner rush."

"Okay."

"It's a thousand dollars." She pushed the envelope through the bars. "It's the first one. I know it's not close."

I took it.

It was soft from her hands.

"Do you want a receipt?"

She blinked.

"What?"

"I write receipts now," I said. "It's thirty-three thousand six hundred. You've paid a thousand, so you owe thirty-two thousand six hundred."

I took a pen from my apron and wrote it on the back of a bakery order slip and passed it through the gate.

Kayla held it in both hands and read it the way someone reads a prescription.

"You're really going to make me pay every dollar."

"Yes."

"And you're not going to say it's okay."

"No."

She nodded, and her mouth shook, and she turned and walked back toward the bus stop without another word.

I watched her go.

The envelope was in my apron pocket.