"It has one eye," she said.
"It's called a naupliar eye," I said. "It can only tell light from dark."
"Huh," Mom said, and handed the phone back, and pulled out onto the road again. "That's me before coffee."
Callie, in the front seat, had been quiet for most of it. When we got home, she went upstairs and came back down with her laptop and opened it on the kitchen table and turned it around so Mom could see.
"I talked to Coach Tamika," she said. "On Monday. Before practice."
Mom sat down slowly. "Okay."
"There's this thing," Callie said, "that I didn't know about, because nobody tells you about it, because it's kind of embarrassing, I guess. There's a fund. The booster parents do a fundraiser every year, the mattress sale thing, and the money goes into a fund for kids whose families can't pay for stuff. And it has money in it right now because nobody asked for it this year. Coach Tamika said everybody's too proud. She said she has to practically beg people. She said, and I quote, I have a hundred and forty kids and every single one of their mothers would rather sell a kidney than fill out my form." Callie looked at Mom when she said that. "So I filled out the form."
"Callie."
"I filled it out. I put your name on it. You have to sign it. It's for half. Six-forty." She clicked to a different tab. "And for the other half, she said I can coach the mini team. The four- and five-year-olds. Tuesdays and Thursdays, an hour each, and she'll credit my account fifteen an hour. I'd have to start next week. And I'd have to do it through June, because it's not enough by April tenth, but she said she'd carry the difference if I'm on the schedule. She said she'd carry me because I'm," and Callie's voice went a little thick, "because she said she's carried worse for less. She said that's a compliment."
"From Tamika, that's a sonnet," Mom said. Her voice was thick too.