"Can I come to the garage on Saturday?"
"You work Saturdays."
"I know," she said. "Can I come anyway?"
I said yes. I didn't think she would.
The next week was strange. Not bad, exactly. Just strange, like the house had been picked up and set back down an inch to the left.
Mom called Dad on Thursday from the Kroger parking lot with the windows up. I know because Callie and I were in the back seat, because she'd forgotten she was driving us to the dentist after, and she got out of the car and walked to the cart corral and made the call standing there, in the wind, with one hand on the corral rail. We watched her through the window. She did not sit down. She did not put her forehead on her knees. She stood up the whole time, and once she pointed at the sky with her free hand, like she was pointing at something only she could see, and Callie said, "Oh, he's dead," and I laughed so hard I got the hiccups.
When she got back in the car she was very calm. She said, "Your father is going to send a check for four hundred dollars toward what he owes, which he says he will put in the mail on Monday, which means Wednesday, which means we'll see. And I've called Marjorie Gwinner's sister, the lawyer, and she's going to look at the decree." She put the car in reverse. "And I don't want to talk about him for the rest of the day, if that's all right with everybody. I want to talk about something else."
"Like what?" Callie said.
"Like anything," Mom said. "Like plankton."
So I told her about plankton. All the way to the dentist and all the way through the waiting room and all the way home, I told her about the plankton tows at Gull Point, how they drag a net shaped like a windsock behind the research boat with a little jar on the end, and how what comes up in the jar looks like nothing, like cloudy water, until you put a drop of it under a microscope and it's a whole city, diatoms like glass jewelry and copepods with one red eye and rotifers spinning like little propellers. How the algae blooms in the western basin of the lake have been getting worse because of fertilizer runoff from the farms, and how the toxins in the blooms got into the water supply in Toledo once and nobody could drink the tap water for three days. How one of the projects you could pick, if you went, was measuring the phosphorus in sediment cores from different places around the island to see where it was building up. I said all of that and more, and Mom asked questions, real questions, and once she pulled over on the side of the road so she could look at a picture of a copepod on my phone.