"I'm telling you."
"Before," she said. "I wish you'd told me before." And then she was late, and she left, and I stood in the kitchen and listened to her Corolla back out of the driveway, the belt squealing because it needed a tensioner, which I had told her, and I thought, that went well.
I had no idea, standing there, how much I hadn't told her. Or I did know, and I had decided it didn't count. That is the part I have thought about most since.
My sister Callie is two years older than me, and she is the kind of person other people describe by saying what she is like in a room. Callie lights up a room. Callie can talk to anybody. When she was in fourth grade a substitute teacher wrote on her report card, Callie is a joy and a force, and Mom stuck it on the refrigerator with a magnet shaped like a tooth and it stayed there for three years until the paper went yellow and curled.
Nobody has ever said what I am like in a room. When people describe me they say what I am like at a table, bent over something. Which is fine. It's true.
Callie started tumbling when she was six, at the rec center, because Mom wanted something for her to do with all that energy. By the time she was eleven she was doing back handsprings across the yard and roundoff back tucks off the porch steps, which made Grandpa put his hand over his eyes, and a woman from an all-star gym in Mansfield saw her at a Fourth of July festival doing a standing full in the grass by the funnel cake stand and gave Mom a card. The gym was called Ohio Velocity. The team Callie made that year was called Velocity Voltage, and the uniforms were black and electric yellow with rhinestones down the side, and I thought it was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen and also somehow the loudest, even when it was just hanging in her closet.
All-star cheer is not the same as school cheer. I didn't understand that at first. School cheer is for football games. All-star cheer is its own sport, with its own competitions in convention centers in Indianapolis and Columbus and Louisville, where twenty-some girls do a two-and-a-half-minute routine with stunts and pyramids and tumbling passes to music that is mostly drum loops and a man's voice shouting the team name, and judges sit at a long table and score you on difficulty and execution. It costs a lot. It costs more than anything else our family does. There are monthly tuition payments and choreography fees and uniform fees and music fees and competition fees and travel, and every year there is a bigger competition at the end called Nationals, and if your team gets a bid to go somewhere far away, like Orlando or Dallas, there is a whole separate set of fees for that.
When Mom and Dad were still married, they paid it together, and they fought about it, but they paid it. Dad sold commercial flooring for a company out of Marion and was gone a lot, and when he was home he was the one who drove Callie to Mansfield and sat in the parents' viewing area with the other dads looking at his phone. He said cheer was a racket. He also cried at her first competition, when she landed her full in the routine and the whole team came off the floor screaming. I saw him. He wiped his face on his sleeve and pretended he had something in his eye, and Callie never knew, and I never told her, because I figured it was his.
He moved to Columbus two years ago in February. There was a woman named Brandy, and then there wasn't, and then there was a different job, and an apartment in Grove City, and a schedule for every other weekend that turned into one weekend a month and then into whenever. The divorce papers said he would pay child support and half of what the papers called extracurricular expenses. Mom did not talk to us about the child support. She talked about it on the phone, on the back steps, with the sliding door closed, in a voice that we could hear anyway.
Last September I heard one of those phone calls. I was in the kitchen getting cereal and the sliding door was not all the way closed, and Mom was sitting on the steps with her knees up and her forehead on her knees and the phone pressed against her ear.
"You said you'd do the fall," she said. "You said. You said you'd cover the fall installments and I'd do the spring and the trip. That was what we said, Dalton. In July. You said it in July." There was a long pause. "No, I can't. I can't. I'm carrying the house. I'm carrying the car. I'm carrying the whole thing, and you are carrying a, what, a timeshare? What is that?" Another pause. "Fine. Fine. Then do it. Then just do it. Just do what you said." She hung up and sat there, and I took my cereal and went upstairs before she could turn around and see me.