"I know."
"You don't pay your sister's bills when you're thirteen. You don't, you don't pay anybody's bills." She turned to Grandpa. "And you drove her. You stood there and let her hand over her, her mower money, to a cheer gym, and you didn't call me. You didn't pick up the phone and say, Mira, your ex-husband is lying to you. You let me find out from a fourteen-year-old over a frozen lasagna."
The timer went off. None of us moved. It beeped and beeped, the high stupid beep our oven makes, and finally Grandpa reached over and pressed the button with his knuckle, because his fingers were shaking too much to hit it straight.
"Yes," he said. "I drove her."
"Why?"
"Because she asked me." He folded his arms over his chest the way he did in the driveway when he was listening to an engine. "Because she came to me with her own money and her own reason, and the reason was good, and the money was hers. I watched her make every dollar, Mira. I sat on a stool and watched. She did not find this money. Nobody gave her this money. She got down on the floor of my garage with a mower that a man threw away and she took it apart and she put it back together and she made it go. Thirty-one times. With these hands, not mine." He held his up, and they shook, and he put them back. "I cannot do it anymore. I have not been able to do it for four years. You know this. You know I stopped. You did not ask how there were mowers in my driveway again."
Mom didn't answer.
"And I did not call you," Grandpa said, "because I am a coward, and because I thought, she is right. Her mother is tired. Her mother is carrying everything. Let this one thing be carried for her. I was wrong. I should have called. That is mine. But you do not get to take her money twice and call it once."
That landed. I watched it land. Mom's hand came off the back of the chair and she put it against her mouth.
"Twice," she said, through her fingers.
"The fall was her," Grandpa said. "Now the spring would be her also. Eleven-forty and twelve-eighty. Two thousand four hundred and twenty dollars, for cheer, from a girl who wants to go look at plankton for two weeks." He said plankton like it was a Romanian word. "Every dollar she earned. That is what I came in here to say. That is the only thing."