"Tell her," he said. "Or I will tell her. But it is better if you."
"Tell me what," Mom said. "Anca. Tell me what?"
Upstairs, the music stopped. I don't know if Callie heard us or if the song just ended. The ceiling went quiet, and the oven fan was the only sound in the kitchen, and I sat at the table with my hands in my lap and my face hot, and I thought about the clipboard on the front desk at Ohio Velocity, turned a little bit toward the door.
"Dad didn't pay the fall," I said.
Mom didn't sit down. She stood there with one hand on the back of her chair, and I told her, and I told it badly, out of order, starting with the clipboard and then going back to the phone call on the back steps that I wasn't supposed to have heard and then forward to Coach Tamika's carrot sticks and the red pen and Mrs. Pelfrey's butterscotch candies, and the three envelopes, and the Thursdays. I told her about the page in the back of the ENGINE LOG that said OTHER. I said the number. Eleven hundred and forty.
When I got to the part about the thumbs-up text, she closed her eyes.
"He sent me a thumbs-up," she said. "I thanked him. I thanked him, and he sent me a thumbs-up."
"I know," I said. "You told us."
"I told you." She opened her eyes. "I told you at dinner. You were sitting right there. You were sitting right there and you let me say that."
"I didn't want you to have to call him."
"That's not your job." Her voice went up and then came back down, fast, like she'd caught it. "That is not your job, Anca. You're thirteen. You were thirteen."