"I'm sorry," Mom said. "I am. I know it isn't fair. I'm not going to pretend it's fair. But I'm the mom, and I have two kids, and I have to look at both of you and make the call, and this is the call. You'll get the money back. You'll go to camp next year. Gull Point will still be there next year. And I'll help you. I'll drive you around to pick up mowers. I'll, whatever you need."
"You don't even know what I do," I said.
"Anca."
"You don't. You've never come to the garage. Not once. You don't know what a float bowl is. You don't know what I do on Saturdays."
"I'm at work on Saturdays," she said, and her voice cracked down the middle. "I'm at work on Saturdays so we can have a house to come home to on Saturdays."
The back door opened.
Neither of us had heard the truck. Grandpa's truck is not quiet, it has a hole in the muffler he has been meaning to fix since the Bush administration, but the kitchen was loud with what we were saying and the oven fan was on and Callie's music was coming through the ceiling, and nobody had heard it. He came in the way he always came in, without knocking, wiping his boots on the mat twice, left and then right, holding a folded check between two fingers.
"The church man paid," he said, and held it up toward me. "Seventy-five for the tune-up. I told him sixty, he said seventy-five, I said fine, I'm not going to argue with a Methodist." Then he looked at the two of us. He looked at Mom's laptop, and the legal pad with the column of numbers, and her face. He looked at mine. He was quiet for a second. Grandpa can read a kitchen the way he can hear an engine running lean.
"What," he said.
"Nothing, Dad," Mom said. "We're just talking. It's handled."
"Mom moved the money," I said. "From my savings. For Callie's Nationals."