"It's okay," I said.
"Don't," she said. "Don't do that. Don't say it's okay. That's the thing. Don't say it's fine." She looked at Grandpa when she said it, just for a second, and he looked down at the table. "I'm going to figure out Orlando a different way. I don't know what way yet. And whatever it is, it's not going to come out of that account. That account is closed to me. I'm going to go to the credit union and take my name off it if they'll let me."
"They won't," I said. "I'm a minor."
"Then I'm going to ask Mrs. Pelfrey to call you every time I walk in the door." She almost smiled. "She'd do it, too. She thinks you hung the moon. She told me at the Kroger last summer, she said, your daughter's the mower girl, and I said, which daughter, and she looked at me like I was crazy." Her face crumpled for a second and she got it back. "I thought she was mixing you up with someone."
We ate the lasagna. The edges were black and the middle was still a little cold and none of us said anything about it. Grandpa ate two pieces, which he does when he doesn't know what else to do, and then he picked up his check from the church man and pressed it into my hand and went home, and from the kitchen window I watched the truck back out of the driveway with its broken muffler rattling, and stop at the end, and sit there for almost a full minute with the brake lights on before it pulled away.
That night I couldn't sleep. I lay in bed and listened to the house. Callie was quiet on the other side of the wall, which she never is, and then around eleven I heard her get up and go downstairs, and I heard her and Mom talking in the kitchen, low, for a long time. I couldn't hear what they said. Once I heard Callie laugh, a wet laugh. Once I heard Mom say Dalton in the voice. Then Callie came back up and stopped outside my door, and I thought she was going to knock, and she didn't. She went back into her room.
A little after midnight my door opened and Mom came in and sat down on the end of my bed. She was in her pajamas, the gray ones with the hole under the arm. She didn't turn the light on.
"You awake?"
"Yes."
"Can I ask you something about the mowers?"