Page 180

“You said there’s a cap because every item takes your hours. So why is all your stuff cheap?”

“Because if it’s cheap, I can’t lose much,” I say, a little defensive, because he sounds like he’s criticizing my whole system. “If I buy a six-dollar sweater and nobody wants it, I’m out six dollars. That’s nothing. It’s a coffee. I can lose a coffee. I can’t lose three hundred dollars.”

“How long does it take you to sell the six-dollar sweater?”

“Photos, listing, messages, packing—” I count on my fingers. “An hour. Maybe less if it’s easy.”

“And how long would it take you to sell a four-hundred-dollar coat?”

I open my mouth. Then I close it because it’s the same. The photos take the same amount of time. The messages are the same messages from the same people at the same hour of the night. The mailer’s a little bigger. The walk to the post office is the same mile. The work doesn’t care what the thing is worth.

“Yeah,” I say because he’s right. He just proved his point.

Rafe doesn’t smile. He just hands me the pen.

I write HIGHER VALUE / SAME HOURS and underline it, and then I sit there looking at it while my brain runs off down the hallway without me through every coat and handbag and pair of boots I’ve ever left on a rack at the Goodwill on Route 9 because the price tag scared me.

“I’d need money up front,” I say, and write CAPITAL under the line. “To buy the good stuff. And somewhere to keep it.” STORAGE. ”And if I’m wrong—”

I stop with the pen on the page.

A ten-dollar mistake is annoying. I’ve made a hundred of them. There’s a fake Coach bag in the back of my closet right now that cost me twenty, and I kept it to remember. But a five-hundred-dollar mistake is insane money and a month of the meal plan. A five-hundred-dollar mistake is the kind of thing that sends you home.

I write RISK and press so hard the pen tears the paper a little at the bottom of the K.

“Yeah,” Rafe says, looking at it.

We’re both looking at it when somebody knocks on the open door.

His mom is standing in the doorway with a plate of cookies.

She’s in the gray cardigan and a pair of slippers with her reading glasses pushed up into her hair. The cookies are the soft kind, still warm, I can tell from here, chocolate chip with the chips half melted, stacked on a plate that has a crack running through it and a faded blue rim.

“I made cookies,” she says.

Rafe says, “Thanks, Mom,” in a voice that means you can put those down and go.

He looks at his mom the way Kylie looks at me when I walk into our room while she’s with Nash.

“Come sit,” I say to her.

Rafe turns his head toward me. I keep my eyes on her and move my legs so there’s room on the other end of the couch, and Mrs. Waleska smiles, a little surprised, and comes in and sits. She places the plate on the coffee table between the tray from earlier and the remote.

“Apparently this is a board meeting now,” Rafe says.

“Then I’d like it noted in the minutes that I brought snacks,” his mom says, and takes a cookie off the plate before anybody else can.

I take one, too. It’s so warm it bends in my fingers. And then, before I can think too hard about whether it’s a strange thing to do, I hold the notebook out to her across Rafe’s lap.

“Can I ask you something? About this?”

She takes her reading glasses down out of her hair and puts them on.

She reads it slowly, from the top, without skipping. WOODBURY, with Rafe’s two lines under the subtraction. The other column, APT 700?, three months. HIGHER VALUE / SAME HOURS. CAPITAL. STORAGE. RISK, with the little tear in the K. Her finger moves down the page and pauses a couple of times.

Then she flips back a page to the night before.

I almost reach out to stop her, and don’t. She reads the list, source, clean, photograph, list, pack, ship, store, and ME = CAP at the bottom, and the line through CAP, and NO CEILING written under it in my handwriting, and stays on that for a while.