Upstairs at the Ledger that evening, Tess spread tracing paper over the base map. The April 18 issue had gone out with the flatter headline and no connecting line. For the following edition, Joan wanted a graphic that would survive reduction instead of merely surviving the deadline. Tess sharpened a pencil and covered the obsolete route. Its red showed faintly through the tracing paper, an old decision refusing to disappear.
She marked states, not transaction sites. The indictment announcement gave her Alaska, New Mexico, Arizona, and Texas. It did not give her enough to place a particular machine on this page or date every mark. She moved each marker into a state label, away from the tempting precision of a city dot. The continent remained recognizable. The marks no longer pretended to know an address.
Beneath them she set: WITHDRAWALS USING THE STOLEN CARD, STATES IDENTIFIED IN THE APRIL 2012 FEDERAL INDICTMENT ANNOUNCEMENT. She printed a reduced test. The source line blurred. She enlarged it and tried again, watching the available white space contract.
Joan Pryce appeared in the doorway holding a coffee that had long since gone cold, her reading glasses pushed up into gray hair that hadn't seen a stylist since the layoffs two years back. She looked at the new, sparer graphic the way she looked at most things that cost her money without obviously making her any.
"You could just cut it," Joan said. "Run the story without the map at all. Nobody downstairs would notice one missing graphic on page four."
"I'd notice."
"You'd notice for free, is my point. Yesterday's press hold cost us. Now there's this rebuild and a test plate for the next edition. That's real money, Tess, money we don't exactly have lying around in a drawer."
"I know what it costs."
"Do you," Joan said, not unkindly, more like a woman stating a fact she expected to be ignored. "Because your freelance thing tonight, the brochure for the dental group, that pays you more in three hours than this paper pays you to fix one map."
Tess had, in fact, already done the math on the drive in, the particular dull arithmetic of a woman who kept a second job not for extra cushion but because the cushion itself had gone missing the year their mother got sick. The dental brochure job paid a flat two hundred and twenty dollars for an evening's layout work, money that, as of that morning, had an address: it was precisely the amount currently overdue on the oil account at their mother's house, the one Paul kept threatening to let lapse into a shutoff notice out of simple exhaustion.
She could have taken Joan's offer. She could have let the map vanish from the next edition, kept her evening, kept the money. But Paul and the copy desk had seen the first version, and she had not checked where every advance proof had gone. Deleting her working file would not recall the pages already out of her hands.
But somebody at the paper had drawn that line once already, confidently, as if drama were the same thing as truth, and Tess had the ugly suspicion that if she simply deleted the graphic rather than replacing it correctly, the next deadline crunch would produce the same bad map again, drawn by someone with less reason to stop and check.
"I'll do it in black and white," she said. "Four state markers, readable labels, no connecting line. No shading, no color work, cheapest plate they'll run."
"That's still tonight's hours."
"Then it's tonight's hours."
She called the dental office from the hallway phone, apologized, and offered a date two weeks out. The office manager said she would see what she could do. Tess returned to the four state labels, adjusted the source line, and printed another reduced test. This one she could read without bringing it closer to her face.
She did the arithmetic once more before she turned off the desk lamp near midnight: two hundred and twenty dollars not earned, against an oil bill two hundred and twenty dollars overdue, the numbers meeting in the middle with the particular cruelty of a coincidence that wasn't really a coincidence at all, just two parts of the same stretched life finally touching.