Callie had stopped crying. She was just looking at him.
"I thought, for many years, that she did not mind," Grandpa said. "Because she said it was fine. Because she was good with people and she smiled at the counter. I let myself think that. It was easier for me." He shook his head. "She minded. She has minded every day for twenty-five years. She has never once said. And she promised herself that if she had children, they would never sit at a table and hear I can't. Never. Whatever it cost. She told me this when Callie made her first team. She said, they will never hear what I heard from you. She was not angry when she said it. She said it like she was telling me the weather."
He looked over at me.
"So you see," he said, "she is not wrong. She is not a bad mother. She is trying very hard not to be me. And she does not know, because nobody told her, that her other daughter has been sitting at the table this whole time hearing I can't and saying it's fine."
Through the glass door, Mom lifted her head. She didn't turn around. She looked out at the yard, at the clothesline and the shed and the chain-link fence and the Yoders' trampoline next door with the net sagging on one side, and she stayed like that, very still, for a long time.
She came back inside after about twenty minutes. Her eyes were dry and her face was blotchy and she had the sleeve of her scrub top pushed up to the elbow on one side, the way she does when she's about to clean something. She didn't say anything to any of us. She walked to the table and pulled the laptop around to face her and put her glasses back on her nose, and she typed for a while, and clicked twice, and then she turned the screen around so I could see it.
The savings said one thousand three hundred and twelve dollars and fourteen cents.
"It's back," she said. "All of it."
"Mom," Callie said.
"I know, baby. Give me a second." She took her glasses off and this time she didn't put them on her head. She folded them and set them down next to the laptop. "I'm not going to make a speech," she said, to me. "I don't have one. I'm going to say I'm sorry, and then I'm going to say it again later when I'm better at it. I'm sorry. I didn't know. That's not an excuse, it's just a fact. I didn't know because I didn't look. I didn't open the statements and I didn't come to the garage and I didn't ask how a fourteen-year-old had eleven hundred dollars, because if I asked I'd have to have room in my head for the answer, and I didn't have any room. That's the truth. I didn't have any room in my head for you, because you were the one who was fine." She stopped. "That's a terrible thing to say out loud."