Then Callie said, "What?"
She was on the stairs. Our stairs come down into the kitchen, there's a half-wall, and she was standing on the third step from the bottom in her practice shorts and a Velocity hoodie with her hair in a wet bun, holding her phone, and I don't know how long she'd been there. Long enough. Her face had gone a weird color, white around the mouth and red on the cheeks, and she was looking at me.
"You paid for Louisville?" she said.
I didn't say anything.
"You paid for Louisville," she said again, not a question this time. "And Cincinnati. And the Christmas showcase." She was counting it in her head. She knew the schedule. She knew what every month was. "Dad didn't pay any of that."
"Callie," Mom said. "Honey, go back upstairs for a minute."
"No." She came down the last three steps. "No, I'm not going upstairs. Anca. You paid for my cheer. With the lawnmowers."
"It was just the fall," I said.
"It was just the fall," she repeated, and she laughed, the way Mom had laughed about the sixteen weeks. "Oh my God. Oh my God, I'm going to throw up. I posted about Louisville. I posted like forty pictures. I tagged Dad. I said thanks for always showing up, Dad, with a heart. He liked it. He liked the post."
Nobody said anything.
"Why didn't you tell me?" she said, and it came out loud, and her voice broke on it, and suddenly she was crying, really crying, not the way Mom does, the way Callie does everything, with her whole body. "Why would you not tell me? You let me walk around for six months thinking, I've been so mean to you. I've been so mean. I called you a gremlin at Christmas because you were in the garage instead of doing presents. I said you smelled like gas. I said it in front of Brynlee."