I don't want to make it sound like everything was fixed. It wasn't. Dad's check came on the Thursday after it was supposed to, and it was for three hundred dollars, not four, with a note on a Post-it that said rest soon, sorry, D., and Mom stuck the Post-it to the refrigerator under the tooth magnet where the old report card used to be, and didn't say what she thought about it, and the lawyer was still reading the decree. The IRS still had the refund. The tensioner on the Corolla still squealed, because I hadn't had time to do it, and because Mom said, very firmly, that her fourteen-year-old was not going to replace her timing belt in a driveway, and I said it wasn't the timing belt, it was the serpentine, and she said she did not care what kind of animal it was.
And I was short. That's the other thing. The savings had one thousand three hundred and twelve dollars in it, plus the seventy-five from the church man that I'd deposited with Mrs. Pelfrey on Monday, plus two mowers sold on the wall waiting for pickup that would bring in a hundred and ninety more. That was fifteen hundred and seventy-seven. Camp was sixteen-forty. Sixty-three dollars. With twelve days until May first.
Mom offered. Of course she did. She said it at the kitchen table that Sunday, sixty-three dollars, honey, let me, I can find sixty-three dollars, and Grandpa offered, and Callie, who had seventeen dollars to her name and owed Brynlee twenty, offered. I said no to all of them. Not because I was mad. Because it was April, and the curbs were starting to fill up, and I wanted to see if I could.
"That's very Basaraba of you," Mom said.
"I know," I said. "It's very annoying."
The Lawn-Boy turned out to be the rings. That's a bigger job than I'd thought, and I didn't know if I could get it done and get it sold by May first. I didn't know if the woman on Rensselaer Street would pay for a ring job on a mower she'd only meant to get a tune-up for. I didn't know if Callie would land her full in Orlando with the man from Kentucky watching, or if she'd land it and he'd watch somebody else, or if Mckenna would end up in the routine anyway, because a girl in the back row broke her wrist the week before they left and they had to re-block. I didn't know if Dad would send the rest soon, or ever, or what soon meant to him. I didn't know if there would be phosphorus in the sediment cores, or how much, or whether I'd be any good at finding it.
What I knew was that on a Saturday afternoon in April, my mother sat on the concrete floor of her father's garage in a volleyball sweatshirt with the K peeled off, with grease on the knees of her jeans, and held a little brass tube up to the window, and found the light in it by herself. And that when I put the Craftsman's carburetor back together and set it on the engine and primed it three times and stood up to pull the cord, she said, wait, wait, can I, and I said yes, and she stood up and planted her feet and pulled it the wrong way, too slow and too short, and nothing happened.
"Harder," Grandpa said from the bench. "Like you mean it, puiule."
She pulled it again, harder.
It coughed, and caught, and ran.