Forty-One Thousand Dollars and a Yellow Paper Envelope

“Because clearing you meant naming who took it.”

“Dustin.”

“Dustin.” He said the name like it had gone sour in his mouth.

“Jonathan knew where every dollar of that forty-one thousand went.

He tracked it himself.

And he knew that the day he walked into a station with it, the state would take that boy apart, and he couldn’t do that to Dustin’s mother.”

“And me?”

“And you, he thought he could reach from a chair.” Arthur stopped at the light on Vine and put his blinker on out of habit, though we were turning left.