Coach Tamika looked at him, and at me, and at the clipboard. Then she took her red pen and drew a line through BENCH AFTER 10/15. "Thursday," she said.
On Wednesday I rode my bike to the credit union and withdrew three hundred and eighty dollars, and Mrs. Pelfrey counted it out in twenties and asked if I was buying a car, and I said no, a carburetor, which was a lie, and she gave me two butterscotch candies instead of one. On Thursday Grandpa drove me to Mansfield and I handed the envelope to Coach Tamika and she counted it and wrote PAID 10/8 on the account card and put it in a drawer, and then she came around the desk and shook my hand. Her hand was small and very strong. "Your sister has no idea," she said, "what she's got."
"She doesn't need to," I said.
Callie competed in Louisville on the twenty-sixth. Velocity Voltage got second. She came home with a jacket patch and a sunburn from the tanning spray and a voice that was completely gone from screaming, and she showed Mom her tumbling pass on her phone eleven times at the kitchen table, whispering because she couldn't talk, and Mom watched it every time like it was the first time.
That Sunday at dinner, Mom said, "Well, your father finally came through," and she said it in the voice she used when she was trying to be fair to him in front of us. "I texted him a thank-you. He sent a thumbs-up. Very eloquent."
Callie rolled her eyes and croaked something about how Dad couldn't spell eloquent. I ate my mashed potatoes. Grandpa was at dinner that night, it was a Sunday, and he did not look at me, and I did not look at him.
I paid the November installment. I paid the December installment. Three hundred and eighty each time, eleven hundred and forty dollars in all, in twenties, in envelopes, on Thursdays, in Mansfield, with my grandfather standing next to me in his Carhartt jacket with his hands in his pockets. In January the spring payments started, and those were Mom's, because that had been the deal, and she paid them, I don't know how. I saw her at the table at night with the calculator and the checkbook and her reading glasses on top of her head where she forgot about them. I went back to my mowers.
It didn't feel like a secret. It felt like fixing something that somebody had left at the curb. You don't tell people every time you clean a jet. You clean it and you put the bowl back on and you pull the cord. That's what I told myself, and I believed it, and I wrote the three withdrawals in the back of the ENGINE LOG on a separate page with a heading that just said OTHER, and I updated the total on the inside cover, and the number I needed did not change.
The bid came in the second week of March.
Velocity Voltage won a competition in Indianapolis that came with something called a paid bid to a national championship in Orlando at the end of April, which meant the competition would cover the team's entry fees, but not anything else. Not the flights, not the hotel, not the meals, not the extra choreography the coaches would add to the routine to make it harder, not the extra practices, not the new competition bows. Coach Tamika sent a letter home with every girl, and the letter had a number at the bottom of it in bold, and the number was one thousand two hundred and eighty dollars per athlete, and below that it said the first half was due March twentieth and the second half April tenth, and that families who were unable to commit by March twentieth would have their athlete's spot given to an alternate so the routine could be re-blocked.
Callie read the letter in the car on the way home from Indianapolis, out loud, in the passenger seat, and then she stopped reading out loud halfway through and read the rest to herself. I was in the back seat. I watched her read the number. She folded the letter in half and then in half again and put it in the cupholder.