He didn't look up. "Not until Saturday night," he said. "I asked Dad how he paid for it. I swear, Jo. Not until Saturday."
"And you kept it."
He looked up then. His eyes were wet. "I tried to—"
"Grant, don't," my father said, and my brother closed his mouth, the way he had been closing his mouth since he was six years old and my father told him boys don't cry in the dugout.
I stood up. My chair went over backwards. I didn't plan that; I'm not a chair-kicker. It just went.
"Sit down," my father said.
"You knew," I said to my mother. "You knew what Grandma wanted. You stood in that yard and cried and took pictures."
"I cried because I was happy for your brother," my mother said, and she was crying now too. "Is that a crime? To be happy for one of my children for one afternoon? You've had everything, Josie. Every award. Every trophy. Every teacher in that school thinks you hung the moon. Your grandmother started saving for you the day you were born and she never did that for—" She stopped.
"For who?" I said.
She shook her head.
"Sit down, Josephine," my father said again, louder. "We are going to discuss this like adults."
And that's when I screamed it. I'm not proud of the volume. I am proud of the words. I've turned them over a hundred times since, looking for the part I'd take back, and I can't find it.
"From today, I'm not your daughter!"
It rang off the cabinets. The dog went under the table. My mother put both hands over her mouth. My father half-rose, and I think, for one second, he was going to come around the table, and I don't know what he would have done if he had. He didn't. He sat back down.
"Go to your room," he said, as if I were nine.
"I don't have a room," I said. "I don't live here."
I went upstairs and packed a duffel bag with shaking hands. Clothes, my laptop, my calculator, my acceptance packet, the framed picture of me and Grandma Ida at Rock City when I was seven. I took the stairs two at a time. Nobody stopped me. My mother was sobbing in the kitchen. My father was standing at the sink with his back to the room, looking out the window at the car in the driveway, which was blue as deep water under the floodlight.
Grant was on the front porch when I came out. He'd gone out the back and around. He was sitting on the step with his elbows on his knees and the key fob in one hand, turning it over and over.