"Go on, Benno," she said. "She asked you a question."
My father pulled out the chair at the end of the table, the one that wobbles, and sat down heavily. He put his elbows on the table and his face in his hands, and then he took his face out of his hands and put his hands flat on the table instead, on either side of his plate, and looked at them. At the gray in the creases.
"You never saw it," he said, "because I sold it."
I didn't say anything. I was holding the tag so hard the edge was cutting into my fingers.
"February before last," he said. "You remember that February? The furnace."
I remembered. Everybody on our street remembered. The landlord said the boiler was the tenants' responsibility under some clause in the lease nobody had read, and it took him nineteen days to send someone, and during those nineteen days my father bought two space heaters and an electric blanket and we all slept in the living room in our coats, the three of us, like camping, and Niva and I thought it was sort of fun for about three nights and then stopped thinking it was fun.
"Your mother's checks stopped that winter," he said. "November, December, January. Three months. She said Grant's company was restructuring. She said she'd catch up. She did catch up, eventually, in April. But in February I had the heaters, and the electric bill from the heaters, and I had your band trip to Albany—" this to me "—and I had Niva's retake fee for the SAT, and the car needed a starter. And I was short. I was short three hundred and forty dollars and I had nine days."
He said the number exactly. I understood that he had carried that number around with him for a year and a half, the way you carry a stone in your shoe because stopping to take it out would mean admitting it's there.
"So I took a couple things over to Pinkney's," he said. "On Bleecker. The loan place."
I knew the place. Everybody knows it. Bleecker Street Loan & Jewelry, with the bars on the window and the guitars hanging from the ceiling and the sign that says WE BUY GOLD in letters as tall as me. I had walked past it a hundred times on the way to Florentine's. I had looked in the window at the guitars and the old trophies and the watches lined up on velvet and the rows of cameras on a glass shelf at the back. I had looked at those cameras, I realized. I had stood at that window on a Saturday last spring with my face close to the glass, waiting for Niva to come out of the bakery, and I had looked at a whole shelf of old cameras, and I had not known that one of them was ours.