She didn’t say anything, and I asked her again.

“Yes,” she said. “Nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“Just those clothes that person ran off in.”

“That was it?”

“That was it.”

We were both quiet.

“I’m filling in again tomorrow,” she said. “So if I’m not home—”

“You’ll be at the tribal offices,” I said.

“Yes,” she said. “And give your grandmother a call tomorrow.”

“I will,” I said.

“Don’t forget. And don’t mention her house getting broken into.”

“I won’t.”

“All right.”

I ate some leftovers of moose meat and rice, and when I finished the plate Fellis and I went out back of his house under the awning and smoked to the sound of rain drumming above us.

“Did she have any money?”

I was surprised it took Fellis so long to ask.

A flash of light blinked in the sky far off, and I counted twelve seconds until the rumble.

“Thunder’s coming,” Fellis said, and he flicked his smoke that was half done.

I walked home at three in the morning. I thought Mom was up when I got home, not because the bathroom light was on but because I could have sworn she was standing right there in the hallway, looking at me. I was so convinced it was her I asked, “Are you all right?” But she wasn’t there; I was just seeing shit between the light and the dark.

I turned the stove light on in the kitchen, and then I went down the hall to the bathroom and turned that light off. Back in the kitchen, I again thought I was seeing things that weren’t there: my grandmother’s safe rested on the kitchen table, and it didn’t get any more real when I put my hands on each side of it and carried it like a watermelon to the living room and sat down on the couch with it in my lap. No. It got real when I took out that key and again had my breath sucked from my lungs when I twisted and pulled open the small door.

Forty-seven hundred dollars was in that small manila envelope with my name on it. I counted it in the dim light that stretched from the kitchen to the living room where I sat, and I thought I miscounted—forty-seven hundred dollars?—and so I counted it again but had got it right the first time. Forty-seven hundred dollars.