"I need," she said, and stopped. "I need a minute."
She went out the sliding door and pulled it shut behind her, all the way shut this time, and sat down on the back steps with her knees up and her forehead on her knees.
The lasagna was burning. I could smell it, the edges going black. Grandpa took it out of the oven with a dish towel and put it on the stovetop and turned the oven off. Callie sat down on the bottom stair and put her face in her hands. I sat at the table and looked at the laptop, which was still open, which still had the credit union website on it, with my account and the number in it, which was thirty-two dollars and fourteen cents.
"Is she going to be okay?" Callie said through her hands.
"She is going to be okay," Grandpa said. "She is a Basaraba. We are always okay. It is very annoying." He pulled out the chair Mom had been standing behind and sat down across from me, slowly, like his knees hurt, which they did. He looked out the glass at the back of her head. "Do you know," he said, "why your mother said, or she could be me?"
I shook my head. Callie lifted her face out of her hands.
"I had a shop," Grandpa said. "You know this. On Sandusky Avenue, where the vape store is now. Basaraba Small Engine. Twenty-two years. Mowers, tillers, chainsaws, snowblowers, outboard motors for the men who fished at the reservoir. Your grandmother did the books. Your mother worked the counter after school from when she was twelve." He smiled a little. "She was very good at the counter. The farmers loved her. She could sell a man a spark plug he did not need and he would thank her."
"Mom worked at your shop?" Callie said. "She never said that."
"No," he said. "She would not." He looked at his hands on the table. "When your mother was sixteen, the big store came out on the highway. The one with the orange. They sold a new mower for less than I could fix an old one. And they had a service counter, and they had financing, and the farmers' sons did not want to drive into town anymore. In two years it was finished. I had loans. I had a building I could not sell. Your grandmother was already sick, the first time, and the insurance from the shop was gone with the shop."
He was quiet for a second.
"Your mother," he said, "played volleyball. You did not know this either. She was a setter. Very good. Better than good. She was on a travel team out of Columbus, and that year the travel team went to a national tournament in Kansas City, and there was a coach there from a college in Indiana who wanted to see her. And it cost, I don't remember, eight hundred dollars. Nine hundred. It might as well have been nine million. And I sat her down at the table, like this, in that house, and I said, puiule, I can't. And she said, I know, Tata, it's fine. It's fine. Just like that. It's fine. And she quit the travel team, and she came and worked the counter every day after school until we closed the doors, and she never played again. Not once. Not even at a picnic."