"I came to see." He wiped his nose on the back of his hand, then looked at his hand and wiped it on the bar towel. "I wanted to see if you were still here. And if you were still nice. Because my mom remembered you from when I was a baby, and that's a long time ago, and people change. Mrs. Petrarca says people change. I took the bus after school. I have a bus pass from the county for school. I didn't have any money for food, I spent my lunch money that day on the bus transfer because I didn't know you could use the pass on the Struthers line. And then I got here and you said sit anywhere and I sat down and I didn't know what to say. I practiced. I had a whole thing I was going to say. And then you came and I just said I didn't have any money, because I thought you'd make me leave, and I wanted to look at you first, before you made me leave."
"I'd never have made you leave."
"I know that now," he said. "I didn't know it then."
The radiator ticked. Out on State Street a snowplow went by, early, scraping sparks off the bricks where the asphalt had worn through.
"And the questions," I said. "Do I have kids. Do I have a house. Does it have a yard."
He went red. Neck up, the way he did. He looked at the yellow square, and then he looked at me, straight, and he said it, the thing he had come all that way to say and hadn't been able to say for four days, the thing he'd practiced on the bus.
"Could I stay with you? Only for twenty-eight days. Only till my mom's better. I'm very good. I can do dishes. I can carry your dad's tank up the stairs. I don't eat that much, I just ate a lot here because Stosh is a good cook. I wouldn't be any trouble." He took a breath that shook. "I don't want to go to Boardman with people I don't know. If I have to go somewhere I want it to be somewhere I already was."
I did not say yes. I wanted to so badly I could taste it, and I didn't, because I had a father on oxygen and a house two months behind and a job that might not last past Christmas, and because I had handed this child across a table once and lain on a floor afterward, and I did not know if I was strong enough to do it twice. And because it wasn't mine to say. It had never been mine to say. That was the whole lesson of 1976.
"Does your mother know you're here?" I said.
He shook his head.