"So I don't need the lake money," Callie said. "Okay? I don't need it. I never needed it. Nobody needed it. I just needed somebody to tell me to go ask."
Mom looked at the laptop for a long time. Then she held her hand out, and Callie gave her a pen, and she signed the form on the trackpad with her finger because that's how it worked, and her signature came out looking like a seismograph.
"That's legally binding," Callie said.
"It's a cheer gym," Mom said. "Nothing there is legally binding."
They were both laughing, and then they were both crying, and I went to the refrigerator and got the orange juice out for no reason, so I'd have something to look at.
The last piece came from somewhere none of us expected, which was Grandpa's back shed.
There was a motor in there. I had seen it a hundred times without thinking about it, the way you don't think about the furnace. It was a 1978 Johnson outboard, twenty-five horsepower, blue and white, on a wooden stand under a tarp, and it was the first engine Grandpa had ever rebuilt in this country, in 1981, a year after he came over from Timiศoara with my grandmother and one suitcase and a toolbox he had carried on his lap on the plane. He had bought it broken for thirty dollars from a man at the reservoir and spent a whole winter on it in the basement of an apartment on Kaler Street, and in the spring he had put it on a rented aluminum boat and taken my grandmother out on the water, and she had been seasick, on a reservoir, and he told this story every Easter. When the shop closed, he sold everything in it, every tool and every part and every sign. He didn't sell the Johnson. He kept it running. Every fall he put fresh gas in it and ran it in a barrel of water in the driveway for ten minutes and then drained it and put it back under the tarp.
On the Saturday after the kitchen, I went over to his house at eight in the morning and the tarp was folded on the workbench and the stand was empty.
"Where's the Johnson?" I said.
"A man in Marion," Grandpa said. He was on his stool by the space heater, with the thermos lid. He didn't look at me. "A collector. He has been asking me for eleven years. Every spring, he calls. Every spring, I say no. This spring I said yes."