To Maya, forty-three dollars was an enormous, monumental sum of money. It was eight boxes of the good cereal with the marshmallows. It was three pairs of new winter boots from the discount aisle. It was, she was certain, enough to fix whatever broken thing Miss Vanessa had used to make her mother cry.
She stuffed the bills back through the narrow slot on the pig’s back. Then she pushed the coins in, one by one.
*Clink. Clink. Clank.*
She wedged the rubber stopper back into the base and wrapped the whole pig in her purple wool scarf so it wouldn’t make noise when she walked.
The next morning was Wednesday.
Erin woke up at five from muscle memory, then remembered she had nowhere to go. Her body ached with a dull, heavy paralysis. She stayed in bed until seven, her eyes staring at the water stains on the ceiling plaster, before getting up to make Maya’s oatmeal.
“Eat up, bug,” Erin said, her voice flat, her eyes rimmed with red. “I have to go down to the job center on Lorain Avenue at nine. Mrs. Gable is going to walk you to the bus stop at eight-fifteen.”
Maya didn’t argue. She ate every bite of her oatmeal. She put her bowl in the sink, rinsed it, and wiped the edge with a sponge just like she had seen her mother do a thousand times.
When Erin went into the small bathroom to wash her face, Maya moved with lightning speed.
She pulled her heavy winter boots on, zipped her lavender puffer jacket, and shoved the ceramic pig, wrapped tightly in its scarf, deep into her school backpack beneath her spelling notebook.
At eight-ten, Mrs. Gable knocked on the door.
“I’ve got her, Erin,” the old neighbor called out. “Take your time downtown. Don’t rush.”
They walked down the narrow wooden stairs together. The morning air was sharp, smelling of wet asphalt and early winter. When they reached the corner of 38th and Detroit, Mrs. Gable turned her back for thirty seconds to greet the postman who was sorting bundles in the back of his white truck.
Maya didn’t hesitate.
She didn’t run—running made people look at you. She simply turned right instead of left, slipped behind the brick bus shelter, and stepped onto the No. 22 Downtown Rapid Transit bus just as the pneumatic doors folded open with a hiss.
The bus driver was an enormous man with headphones over one ear. He didn’t look at the small girl in the lavender jacket; he only looked at the plastic fare card she held up. It was Erin’s emergency backup pass, which Maya had taken from the ceramic bowl beside the apartment door.
The machine beeped. The gate clicked.
Maya walked down the aisle, her boots squeaking on the wet ribbed rubber floor, and sat in the very front seat near the window.
She rested her heavy backpack on her lap, both arms locked around it.
Through the window, the gray streets of Cleveland rolled past: the pawn shops with their iron security grates, the mural of the steelworkers on the viaduct wall, the cold brown swell of the Cuyahoga River winding beneath the massive rusted trusses of the railroad bridges.
Then, rising through the mist like giant glass needles, came the towers of Public Square.
Maya knew the building.
She had drawn it once. It was fifty-two stories tall, clad in reflective blue-black glass that looked like the surface of a deep pond. At the seventeenth floor, the building stepped back, forming a wide stone terrace where, in the summer, small ornamental pear trees grew in concrete boxes.
That was where her mother’s boss worked.
The man who had pinned her picture of the house with the crooked chimney to his wall. The man who had looked at her mother’s pencil marks on the big blueprints and hadn’t laughed, but had nodded slowly, as if he were listening to church music.
Mr. Cole was back from Seattle.
Frank had told Maya once that Mr. Cole always flew the red-eye flight on Tuesday nights so he could be at his drafting table before the sun came up on Wednesday.
The bus hissed to a stop at Superior and Ontario.
