"The Mayor," he said.
"The Mayor."
"Nine years old."
"Nine in March. He's good at long division. He thanked Stosh for burning his sandwich."
Pop laughed, which made him cough, which went on for a while. When it was done he wiped his eyes and said, "So what's the problem?"
I told him the problem. I told him all the problems. I counted them out on the table like change: the oxygen, the Dollar Bank, Helen and the man from Akron, the license that lapsed in 1977, the home study that takes months. And under all of them, the one I didn't count out loud, because he'd been there. The floor of the little room on Poland Avenue.
Pop listened to all of it with his eyes half closed. When I was done he sat there breathing for a while. Then he said, "You know what I did, when your mother died?"
"You went to work."
"I went to work," he said. "Next day. At the mill, the part that was still open. Everybody said, Mickey, take a week. I went to work. I thought, if I don't stop, it can't catch me." He tapped the table. "And it never did catch me, Dodie. Never caught Len, neither, he outran it all the way to Texas. And now look. I'm sixty-nine years old and I'm sitting in a kitchen with a tank, and I never once in four years let myself miss her all the way, and you know what I got for it? I got four years of not missing her all the way." He coughed. "You're going to lose that boy. One way or another. In twenty-eight days or twenty-eight years. Everybody loses everybody, that's the deal you get. That's not the question. The only question is, when he's grown, does he get to know that somebody tried?"
I didn't say anything.