"We'll figure it out," Mom said, with both hands on the wheel.
"It's fine," Callie said. "It's fine if I don't go. Like, honestly. Mckenna's alternate. Mckenna would kill to go."
"We'll figure it out," Mom said again, and the way she said it, the second time, made Callie stop talking.
Callie was sixteen and a junior. She had been on Voltage for five years and she was the team's best tumbler and one of only two girls who could throw a full twisting layout out of a roundoff back handspring, and a man from a college program in Kentucky had come up to her after the Indianapolis competition and given her his card, and said they'd be watching at Orlando. College cheer programs give scholarships. Not big ones, most of them, but some. Mom knew that. Mom had put the card in her wallet, behind her license, where she kept the things she did not want to lose.
The car had needed a transmission flush and a new tensioner and two tires in February, which was eight hundred dollars. The furnace had needed a part in January. The tax refund, which Mom had been counting on, was being held because Dad had claimed Callie as a dependent on his return too, even though the papers said Mom got to claim both of us, and now the IRS had to sort it out, and the woman on the phone said it could take sixteen weeks. Mom said that to the kitchen in general one night, the sixteen weeks, and then she laughed in a way that wasn't laughing.
I knew all this. I knew all this and I did the math, and the math was obvious, and I did not want to do it, so I went to Grandpa's after school every day that week and worked on a Husqvarna that a man from the Methodist church had dropped off for a tune-up, and I didn't come home until dinner.
On Wednesday, March eighteenth, I came home at six-fifteen and Mom was sitting at the kitchen table with her laptop open and her reading glasses on her face for once, not on her head, and a pad of yellow legal paper next to the laptop with a column of numbers on it. Callie was upstairs. I could hear her music through the ceiling. The kitchen smelled like the frozen lasagna Mom made on the nights she didn't have time to make anything, and the timer on the stove said eleven minutes.
"Sit down for a second, honey," Mom said.
I sat down. I knew. I think I knew from the doorway. There is a certain way she looks at a screen when she has already done the thing and is about to explain it, and I had seen it when she canceled our cable, and when she told us Dad was moving out, and when she told us our cat Waffle had to be put down. She looks at the screen and not at you, and she takes the glasses off, and she puts them on top of her head.
She took the glasses off and put them on top of her head.
"So I want to talk to you about something," she said, "and I want you to hear the whole thing before you say anything. Okay? Can you do that for me?"