So I was on the floor of the garage with the Lawn-Boy on its side and the spark plug out and a flashlight in my teeth, looking down into the cylinder at the piston, when Mom's Corolla pulled into the driveway with its belt squealing.
I heard her get out. I heard her stand there for a second. Then she came into the garage, and she was wearing jeans and a sweatshirt I hadn't seen in years, an old gray hooded one that said CRAWFORD COUNTY VOLLEYBALL on the front in faded red letters with the K half peeled off, and she had her hair in a ponytail, and she was holding a bag of donuts from the Sunoco.
"I called in," she said. "I've never called in. Dr. Nwankwo asked me if I was dying."
"Are you?"
"I said I was having a family emergency," she said. "Which is true. It's just a very slow one." She held the donuts out toward Grandpa. "Tata."
Grandpa took a donut and didn't say anything, which, from him, was a speech.
Mom stood in the middle of the garage and looked around. She looked at the pegboard with the tools on it, outlined in black marker so you'd know where each one went, which Grandpa had done when I was eleven and which I had redone in the fall when the marker faded. She looked at the shelf with the coffee cans and the film canister and the orphanage. She looked at the three mowers lined up along the wall with paper tags on their handles in my handwriting, SOLD, SOLD, TUNE-UP PICKUP THURS. She looked at the green composition book open on the bench, and she went over to it and looked at it for a long time without touching it, and I let her.
"Thirty-one," she said.
"Thirty-one," I said. "Plus the church man's on Tuesday, but that's a tune-up. I count tune-ups separate."
She turned a page. Then another. She got to the back, to the page that said OTHER, and she stopped there, and read the three lines, and the dates, and her hand went flat on the page for a second, like she was holding it down in a wind.