Chapter 37: Twelve Dollars

Min Gitae did not wait for Sunday.

He walked up my lane through the thinning crowd, past Odette's tray and Rory's truck.

The girls in the hoodies moved aside to let him by.

Nobody spoke to him.

The grandmother in the wheelchair turned her whole chair to watch him pass.

He stopped at the gate, three paces from me, and looked at Chan and Hyunjin and our joined hands.

"Ms. Larkin," he said. "I was told your lighthouse is closed to the public."

"It is."

"I would like to speak to them privately."

"That's nice," I said. "I'd like a lot of things."

Chan's hand tightened in mine.

"Anything you say to us, you can say in front of her," he said. "And in front of them."

He tipped his head at the crowd.

Min's mouth did something small and tight.

"Very well. Where?"

I looked up at the tower, white against the grey sky, with its red cap and its empty gallery.

"Tour's twelve dollars," I said. "Cash. Odette will take it, she's saving for a new oven."

Odette, God love her, held out her apron pocket without a flicker.

Min paid.

He paid with a crisp bill from a leather wallet, in front of a hundred people.

Odette wrote him a receipt on the back of a napkin.

I took the lighthouse keys off my belt and unlocked the door.

The crowd followed us up the bluff, quietly, and stopped at the foot of the tower.

Rory came, and the constable, who had been leaning on her car.

The girl in the yellow raincoat asked Rory if she could come too.

He told her she could stand by the door.

Inside it smelled of cold stone and old paint.

Min climbed the first flight of the stair behind us, one hand on the rail, and was breathing hard by the third.

"Forty-two steps to the lamp room," I said. "Nobody told you?"

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