Lien on the Living

The shoe was by the front door where Kaylee had kicked it off, and from the kitchen Jolene could see the toe where the canvas had worn through to the sock. Pink sock. Some cartoon on it — a fox or a cat or something with big eyes that Kaylee talked about at dinner, the name of which Jolene could never hold in her mind because by the time Kaylee said it Jolene was already calculating the electric bill or whether the ground beef would stretch to Wednesday.

She poured coffee into a mug that said WORLD’S BEST DAD, which had been Ronnie’s and which she kept because it held coffee, and stood at the counter and looked at the shoe and did not think about what she was going to do that morning. She had already thought about it. Eleven days she had thought about it and then stopped because thinking about it made it a decision, and it was not a decision. It was the thing that was left after all the decisions had been made by other people in offices she had never seen, and the last letter from Heartland Capital Holdings of Tulsa, Oklahoma, was under the salt shaker where she put mail she could not answer.

Kaylee came down the hall in her socks, sliding on the linoleum. Trent behind her, nine years old and already walking like a man late for something.

Mama can I have the cereal with the red box.

We have the yellow box.

The yellow box tastes like the box.

Then eat the box. There’s fiber in it.

Trent laughed. Kaylee did not. She was six and understood that cereal was not a joke. Jolene poured two bowls and set them on the table and put the milk between them and watched her children eat and tried to memorize something about the morning — the light, the way Kaylee held her spoon like a shovel, Trent’s cowlick — because by this afternoon she would be a different person and she wanted to keep something from the one she had been, the way you grab a coat off a hook when the house is on fire.

The bus came at seven-fifteen. She watched it take them. Then she washed the bowls and set them in the rack and wiped the counter and took off her robe and put on the clothes she had laid out the night before — plain clothes, the kind you wore to the grocery store or the feed lot or to rob a bank three towns over on a Tuesday morning.

She called Val at seven-thirty.

Val answered on the fourth ring, which was three rings longer than Val usually took.

I need you to drive, Jolene said.

There was a pause. In the pause was the distance between their lives — Val in her apartment above the Dollar General in Ralston, no kids, no husband alive or otherwise, a job that paid eleven-fifty an hour and asked nothing of her but attendance, and Jolene in this house that belonged to Heartland Capital Holdings on a note that was twenty-three thousand dollars past due on equipment Ronnie had bought and sold and gone to Henryetta Correctional for selling because it turned out the equipment was collateral on a different loan and selling collateral was fraud, which Jolene had not known and Ronnie had not known and the bank had known and had waited to mention until the moment when mentioning it could take everything at once.

I know what you’re asking, Val said.

I know you know.

Another pause. Jolene heard something on the other end — a television, maybe, or a radio, some ambient voice filling up the rooms of Val’s life.

What time, Val said.

Nine-thirty. The bank in Atoka opens at nine. We go at nine-thirty. One teller on Tuesdays. I checked.

You checked.

I went in last week and cashed a check. Twenty dollars. Rhonda Pitkin was working the window. She used to babysit us.

Val was quiet for a long time. Then: Jesus Christ, Jo.

I know.

You cashed a check. You went in there and cashed a check like you were shopping for the right one.

I needed to know what was in the drawer.

What’s in the drawer?

However much is in it.

Jolene heard Val exhale.

I’ll be there at eight-forty-five, Val said, and hung up.

Val drove a Dodge Dakota with two hundred and eleven thousand miles on it that Ronnie used to call the Miracle because it should have died years ago but kept not dying, which made the truck either brave or stupid and Ronnie had never decided which. The seat springs were shot on the passenger side and Jolene sat low and watched the country go past — red dirt and winter wheat barely started and oil jacks nodding in the pastures like animals at prayer.

Val had brought coffee in a thermos and two ham sandwiches wrapped in foil. She’d set the sandwiches on the dashboard like they were going to a job site. Jolene looked at them.

You made sandwiches.

I didn’t know how long this was going to take.

It’s going to take four minutes. Five if there’s a line.

There’s not going to be a line. It’s Atoka on a Tuesday.

Then I guess we’ll eat the sandwiches after.

The highway ran south through Coalgate and past the turnoff to the lake where their father used to fish before the lake went bad, which it did around the same time the chicken plant closed and the feedlot consolidated and the young people left for Tulsa or Dallas or wherever they went.

You bring it, Val said.

Jolene opened her jacket and showed the butt of the revolver. It had been their father’s — a Smith & Wesson .38 that he had kept in the glovebox of his truck for thirty years and fired four times, twice at a coyote and twice at a road sign, hitting the sign both times and the coyote never. He had died in 2019 of a heart attack at the Tractor Supply in McAlester and the gun had come home with his other things in a paper bag from the hospital.

You know how to use it, Val said. Not a question.

I’m not going to use it.

That’s not what I asked.

Jolene put the jacket back over the gun. A grain elevator rose on the horizon and fell behind them and another rose and they were all the same elevator, the same concrete monument to something that used to matter here.

What’s the plan after, Val said.

After what.

After we walk out with the money. What’s the plan.

We drive to Durant. I deposit it at the First National. Then I wire it to Heartland Capital.

You’re going to wire stolen money to the people you stole it from.

I’m going to make a payment on my house.

Val looked at her across the cab. She had their mother’s face — wide, skeptical, a face that had been lied to early and often and had learned to sit with it.

How much is the note, she said.

Twenty-three.

And how much is in the drawer in Atoka.

However much is in it.

Val drove. The Dakota’s engine made a sound like a dog that wanted to go inside.

The bank was a brick building on the south side of the courthouse square in Atoka. There was a flag out front that had gone from red to pink in the weather. There was a parking lot with four spaces and three of them were empty. The fourth held a Honda Civic with a child seat in the back that Jolene tried not to look at.

Val parked across the street in front of a pawn shop that had been a hardware store that had been, according to the date stone above the door, a mercantile established in 1907. Val left the engine running.

Jolene sat with her hand on the door handle. The gun was against her ribs. She thought about the shoe by the front door and the letter under the salt shaker and the number on it and the number in the drawer across the street that she did not know yet.

Go, Val said. Or don’t go. But don’t sit here.

Jolene went.

The bank smelled like carpet cleaner and the particular nothing that money smells like when it is someone else’s. Rhonda Pitkin was at the window. She was fifty-four and had a photograph of a grandchild taped to her monitor and she looked up at Jolene the way you look up at anyone who walks into a bank on a Tuesday, which is without interest or alarm.

Jolene set the gun on the counter. She did not point it. She set it down the way you set down a thing you have been carrying too long, and Rhonda looked at the gun and then at Jolene’s face and saw that Jolene was more frightened than she was, and something passed between them that was not sympathy but was older than either of them.

Rhonda opened the drawer.

She took out the money in stacks and set them on the counter without counting, and Jolene put the stacks in a grocery bag — a bag from Homeland, which was where she bought the yellow-box cereal — and she picked up the gun and put it back inside her jacket.

I’m sorry, Jolene said.

Rhonda said nothing. She did not reach for the silent alarm until Jolene was through the door, and whether the delay was fear or something else was a question neither of them would ever settle.

The sun was up full and the courthouse flag was pink and the Honda Civic with the child seat was still in the lot. Jolene crossed the street and got in the Dakota and Val pulled out slow and careful, the speed of a woman going to the post office, because running was what got you caught and ordinary was what got you home.

They were on the highway before either of them spoke. Val unwrapped one of the sandwiches and ate it with one hand on the wheel, chewing with the same patience she brought to everything, as though crime were a task no different from stocking shelves.

How much, Val said, with her mouth full.

Jolene counted it on her lap with her hands shaking. The bills were worn and the rubber bands were old and one of the stacks had a deposit slip mixed in from someone named Berger who had deposited four hundred and twelve dollars on a Friday.

Sixteen thousand, Jolene said.

Val stopped chewing. She set the sandwich on the dashboard and her hands tightened on the wheel and Jolene could see the bones in her knuckles.

The note is twenty-three.

I know what the note is.

You’re seven short.

I know what I’m short.

The Dakota’s engine labored up a grade. A semi passed them going the other direction and the wind off it rocked the cab. Jolene put the money back in the Homeland bag and held it in her lap and looked out the window at the country, which was the same country it had been an hour ago except now she was a felon in it.

They drove to Durant. Jolene went into the First National and deposited sixteen thousand dollars in cash. The teller was a young man who counted it twice and did not look at her face. He asked if she wanted a receipt. She wanted a receipt.

She drove home in her own car, which she had left at Val’s that morning. Val did not come with her. They had not discussed it.

The kids got home at three-forty. Kaylee’s other shoe had a hole in it now too. Both toes. Both socks visible — the pink ones with the cartoon character Jolene could not name.

Mama I need new shoes.

I know, baby.

Kaylee sat on the couch and pulled her socks up through the holes in her shoes and looked at her feet and then at Jolene with an expression that was not accusation but was adjacent to it, the way a child looks at a parent when the child has begun to understand that wanting is not the same as having.

Jolene made dinner. Ground beef with onions and rice. She poured milk and set the table and they ate and she helped Kaylee with her reading — a book about a dog that finds its way home, every page an accusation — and put them to bed and stood in the hallway outside their rooms and listened to them breathe and went to her bedroom and closed the door.

The boot box was in the closet on the shelf above the hanging rod. She had to stand on her toes to get it down. The boots were Ronnie’s — Justin Ropers, worn at the heels, the leather creased and shaped to his feet so precisely that the boots looked like they were still standing in them. She had sold the truck and the tools and the tack and the dogs — they’d had two dogs and she had sold them both to a family in Coalgate for a hundred dollars each, which was less than the dogs were worth and more than anyone would pay — but she had kept the boots because you have to keep something.

She put the money on top of the boots. Sixteen thousand dollars on a dead man’s shoes. She closed the box. She put the box back on the shelf. She closed the closet door and the latch clicked in the frame.

She sat on the bed. The house was quiet. The mortgage was twenty-three thousand dollars. She had sixteen. She was seven thousand dollars short of keeping this house, which was not a good house — the bathroom ceiling leaked and the furnace ran on optimism — but which contained her children’s beds and her children’s clothes and the shelf where Trent kept his library books and the hook where Kaylee hung her backpack.

Ray Wheel was the county sheriff and he had dated Val for a summer when they were seventeen, the summer the Kiamichi flooded and half of Antlers went underwater and they had fallen together the way people fall together in a crisis, which is quickly and without asking whether it makes sense. That was a long time ago. He was sitting in his truck outside the courthouse in Atoka when the call came in. He listened. He wrote the description in his notepad — two women, Dodge pickup, the older one had a revolver she placed on the counter rather than pointed, which Rhonda repeated twice because the distinction mattered to her.

Two women. Dodge Dakota. One of them knew Rhonda’s name.

He sat in the truck. He was not a man given to anguish. He was a man given to arithmetic. He thought about the cost of an arrest, the cost of a trial, the cost to the town of watching him put handcuffs on a woman whose husband was in prison and whose children were in the school where his niece went, a woman the town had watched lose everything by degrees the way you watch a house settle into bad ground. He thought about what the town would say. He thought about what it would not say, which was worse.

He put the notepad in his glovebox. He started the engine. He drove to the Sonic on Main and ordered a cherry limeade and drank it in the parking lot and did not call dispatch and did not pull the security footage and did not drive to the house on Rural Route 4.

Val called at ten.

I can’t sleep, Val said.

Jolene was at the kitchen table. The shoe was still by the front door. She had not moved it.

The one in Hugo, Jolene said.

What?

The bank. In Hugo. It’s smaller than Atoka. One teller. Open at nine.

There was a pause. It was longer than the pause that morning and made of different material.

Same arrangement, Val said.

Same arrangement.

When.

Thursday.

The line was quiet. Jolene listened to her sister breathe across eleven miles of Oklahoma darkness.

Thursday, Val said, and hung up.

Jolene sat at the table. Outside, something moved in the yard — a dog or a coyote or just the wind. The shoe was by the door. The closet held the boots and the money that was not enough and the house held the rest of it, the beds and the cereal and the things she could not put a number to. She sat there a long time. The furnace ran. The house made the sounds a house makes at night — the foundation, the particular creak of a structure that is still standing.