I want to be clear about something, because later it mattered. Grandpa did not give me the money. He gave me the garage, and the truck, and the tools, and the talking. He took nothing out of the sales and when I tried to pay him for gas he got offended in Romanian, which is a specific thing that sounds like a radiator coming on. But every dollar that went into the notebook went in because a mower that did not run had been made to run, and I was the one who had made it run. His hands had been shaking for four years by then. The doctor called it essential tremor, which Grandpa thought was a funny name, because, he said, what was essential about it. It got worse when he was tired or when he had coffee, and he was always tired and he always had coffee. He could still pull a starter cord and he could still lift a mower deck and he could hear, from across the garage, the exact wrong note in an engine that was running lean. But he could not seat a needle valve or thread a carburetor screw or set a spark plug gap with a feeler gauge, not anymore, and he had stopped taking repair jobs from neighbors around the time I turned eleven, and he had been sad about it in the way he was sad about most things, which was quietly and with a lot of extra coffee.
Then he showed me the wire.
I don't think he meant it to turn into a business. I think he meant it to give me something to do on Saturdays while Mom worked the weekend half-shift at the dental office and Callie was at the gym in Mansfield, and I think he meant to give himself someone to talk to about engines who would not leave. I didn't leave. I came back the next Saturday, and the next, and by Labor Day of that first summer I had rebuilt the carburetor on his own mower and an old Briggs and Stratton that had been sitting under a tarp behind the garage since my grandmother died, and he had stood in the driveway with his arms folded and listened to it run and not said anything for a long time.
"Your mother," he said finally, "could never sit still long enough to do this."
"I know," I said. Mom could not sit still long enough to watch a movie. She folded laundry during movies.
"She was good with people," he said. "You are good with things. Both is good." Then he went inside and came out with the green composition book and wrote ENGINE LOG on it and handed it to me.
On the inside cover of that book, in my own handwriting, below his, was a number that I updated every time I sold something. It was the total. Underneath the total was another number, which was the number I needed, and the second number did not change. It had been the same since the October before, when Ms. Szilagyi, my earth science teacher, had stopped me after class and handed me a folded brochure and said, "Don't lose this, and don't let anybody tell you it's not for you."
The brochure was for the Gull Point Field Station Summer Research Program, which was a two-week residential camp on an island in Lake Erie run by the university in Columbus. Forty students from all over Ohio, ages fourteen to seventeen. You lived in a dormitory that used to be a fish hatchery and you went out on a research boat every morning and pulled water samples and plankton tows and sediment cores, and in the afternoon you worked in a real lab on a real project with a real graduate student, and on the last day you presented your findings in a lecture hall to actual scientists. There was a photograph on the back of the brochure of a girl about my age in a life jacket holding up a glass jar of lake water to the sun, squinting at it, and the jar was full of tiny moving specks, and the expression on her face was exactly the expression I had when I held a float bowl up to the garage window and saw daylight through the jet.
The program cost one thousand six hundred and forty dollars. There were scholarships, but the scholarships covered half at most and you had to apply for them with your family's tax return, and I knew without asking that Mom would not want to hand our tax return to a university. She did not even like handing it to the man at the H&R Block on Sandusky Avenue. So in October, on the inside cover of the ENGINE LOG, I wrote 1,640 and drew a box around it.
I applied in December. I wrote the essay at Grandpa's kitchen table about the difference between a two-stroke and a four-stroke engine and why one of them needs oil mixed into the gas and how that is a little like how some lakes need nutrients mixed in and some lakes are drowning in them, which Ms. Szilagyi said was either brilliant or insane and she wasn't sure which but she was sending it. I got in on the second of February. I got the letter at school, because I had put Ms. Szilagyi's classroom address on the application, and I read it standing up in the hallway by the trophy case and then I went into the bathroom and sat in a stall and read it again.
I did not tell Mom that day. I told her two days later, on a Saturday morning, when she was standing at the counter eating toast over the sink so she would not have to wipe the crumbs off a plate, in her scrubs with the little cartoon teeth on them, her keys already in her other hand.