Even Steven by John Gilstrap

"Six."
    "Really?" Russell couldn't keep the surprise out of his voice. "You know this?"
    Sarah smiled. "Photographic memory. Four-point-oh business grad from Harvard."
    Why did this surprise him so much? He stuffed the cards into his jacket pocket. "Six. Well, that really will narrow down our initial search, won't it?" Then to George and the young couple: "Let's hike back up to where you were when you heard this yelling."
    April Simpson checked her watch one more time, then walked to the tall windows to see if the used-car manager was anywhere in sight. It had been fifteen minutes since he'd taken her Geo on a test drive, and in that time, he should have been able to make a decision. April prided herself on the condition of that car, and she expected a top-dollar offer.
    She dumped the cold coffee into the trash can, then checked the imprint on the bottom of the cup before tossing it in, too. The jack of spades fit in with the rest of her instant poker hand to give her a pair of nothing. Zip. No one could ever say that her luck was not consistent.
    Scanning the horizon, past the sea of parked cars and the spiderweb of banners and little whirly-gigs overhead, she saw no sign of the fat manager in the ill-fitting suit. Across the lot, a pair of old folks drooled over a champagne-colored Caprice, while a hotshot sales guy drooled over them. April had happened to see the price tag on that boat of a car on her way in, and it angered her that people would even consider spending $40,000 on a vehicle-nearly twice what she made in a whole year, working two jobs. Before taxes. Jesus, life was unfair.
    What did you have to make to afford a car like that? A hundred grand a year? As for grandma and grandpop out there, they were probably already retired and living off their investments, so that made them worth what? A million bucks? A half million, anyway. All the money in the world.
    And April was trying to scrape together enough pennies to buy back her son.
    The shame of it all gripped her insides with an iron claw, lacerating that part of her where faith resided. The world shouldn't have such extremes; there shouldn't be an opportunity for rich old people to be planning for their carefree retirement at the same moment when she didn't even know if her little boy was still alive.
    The old couple looked pleased as they lifted their heads out of the Caprices trunk, and as the lady pointed to the sticker, her expression seemed to say, "Not bad at all."
    April hated them both.
    How could everything-everything-have gone so wrong in her life? What had happened to the days when she and her dad used to dream about her acting career? God knows she had the looks for it, with her lush auburn hair and long Scandinavian features, and she'd been the star of every show her high school produced.
    The plan had always been clear: her father would continue to work double shifts for as long as it took for her to graduate from the North Carolina School for the Arts, and then, when she finally made it on Broadway, she'd build a special wing for him in her home in the Hamptons. Her dad needed to escape the mills, and after all the sacrifices he'd endured to make their life together decent and respectable- just the two of them-she owed him something better. She could see the desperate hope in his eyes whenever they dreamed aloud, and the mere fact that he had never said she was being ridiculous made the dream seem that much more feasible.
    Never in all its thousands of iterations, however, did the dream ever include a tumor. She'd just completed her second full week of college in Winston-Salem when she got the call to fly home. Her father had collapsed in the front yard after mowing the grass, and the prognosis was as bleak as it could get. Cancer had been entwining his brain stem for years, the doctors told her. Even if he'd noticed the symptoms, there was likely nothing they could have done. As it was, they gave him two months to live.
    He only took three