I thought about it for about a week. I thought about it while I was taking apart a leaf blower and while I was riding to the credit union and while I was lying in bed listening to Callie on the other side of the wall talking on FaceTime to her friend Brynlee about a stunt sequence, laughing so hard she kept snorting. Then, on the first Tuesday of October, Grandpa and I went to pick Callie up from practice because Mom had a late billing night, and I went inside the gym to use the bathroom, and on my way back out I passed the front desk.
There was a clipboard on the front desk. There was always a clipboard on the front desk. But that night it was turned a little bit toward the door, and it said ACCOUNTS PAST 30 DAYS at the top, and under that there were six names, and the fourth name was Hollins, C. and next to it was 380.00 and a note in red pen that said BENCH AFTER 10/15 PER POLICY.
I stood there and read it twice. Behind me, through the glass, the whole team was doing a full-out run of the routine, and Callie was in the front, in the middle, which is where they put the best tumblers, and she threw her tumbling pass and landed it and pointed at the ceiling with both hands the way she does, and the music was so loud I could feel it in my stomach.
The woman behind the front desk was Coach Tamika. She is the owner of Ohio Velocity and she is about five feet tall and has a voice like a referee's whistle, and all the girls are terrified of her and also would die for her. She was eating carrot sticks out of a Ziploc bag and doing something on the computer. She saw me looking at the clipboard. She did not flip it over.
"You're the little sister," she said.
"Yes, ma'am."
"You know about this?"
"No, ma'am. Does my mom?"
She looked at me for a second with a carrot stick in her hand. "I've sent four emails," she said. "To the address on the account. Which is your dad's."
The account was in Dad's name. Of course it was. He'd set it up when Callie first made the team, when we all lived in the same house, and nobody had changed it after. The emails went to him. Mom thought he was paying. He wasn't paying. And he wasn't telling her he wasn't paying, because then he would have to have the phone call on the back steps again, and Dad would rather do almost anything than have that phone call.
"What does bench mean?" I said. I knew what it meant. I wanted to hear it.