"I'm sorry," he said. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to make you cry."
I sat back down across from him. I wiped my face with a bar towel, which smelled like bleach. My voice, when I found it, came out strange.
"When's your birthday, hon?"
He swallowed. "March second."
"What year?"
"Nineteen seventy-five."
I nodded. I knew that. I'd known it since Tuesday, it turned out; some part of me had known it and stood very quietly in a corner waiting for the rest of me to catch up. "And what's your whole name? Your real one."
He looked down at the yellow square. "Dougie," he said, very small. "Casey's my middle name. My mom stopped calling me Dougie when I was little. She said it was her dad's name and he wasn't a good man and she wanted me to have a name that was just mine. But it's still what's on my birth certificate. Dougie Casey Rusnak." He turned the square over in his hands. "She said you'd know me as Dougie, not Casey. Dougie, and the Mayor. She said a man at the restaurant called me the Mayor."
"My father," I said. "My father called you that. He still has that bear's laugh. He used to sing to you in Slovak."
Something happened in his face. "I didn't know that part," he said.
"Where'd you get the blanket?"