"It's so small," she said.
"It's supposed to be small. If it was bigger, it'd run rich. Too much gas."
She lowered it and looked at me. Her eyes were doing the thing again, the wet thing, but she was smiling. "Anca," she said, "I have no idea what you just said."
"That's okay."
"Don't," she said, and pointed the jet at me like a tiny brass finger. "Don't say that's okay."
"Fine," I said. "Then you have to listen to the whole thing."
"Then I'll listen to the whole thing," she said.
So I told her the whole thing. About rich and lean, and air and fuel, and how an engine is really just a machine for making a very small explosion happen at exactly the right time over and over, and how most of what's wrong with most engines is that something got old and gummy and nobody noticed. She listened. She asked questions. Some of them were bad questions, and I told her they were bad questions, and she laughed. Grandpa finished his donut and got up and went to the bench and pretended to sort the orphanage, and every so often he said a word in Romanian to nobody, which is what he does when he's happy and doesn't want anyone to know.
At about eleven Callie texted Mom a picture from the gym. She was standing on the spring floor in a Velocity T-shirt surrounded by eleven four-year-olds in matching black bows, all of them trying to do star jumps and none of them doing it at the same time, and one of them was lying flat on her back with her arms and legs out like a dead bug, and Callie was laughing so hard her eyes were closed. Under it she'd typed, i am going to die here. pls tell anca i said thank u. pls tell her im still mad she didnt tell me.
Mom showed it to me and I typed back on her phone, tell her i said she smells like hairspray, and Mom sent it, and Callie sent back a whole row of the middle finger emoji followed by a whole row of hearts.