"You were good at it," Pop said. "I watched you. Fourteen months. You were the best I ever saw at anything, and I saw a man pour a heat at the open hearth in 1951 that they still talk about." He pushed himself up from the table, slow, with Lady Bird's handle. "Porch step needs fixing," he said. "Before the county comes. Lefty Sopko's got a saw."
I went back on Saturday like I promised, after my shift, with a meatloaf sandwich wrapped in wax paper from Stosh and a rice pudding from Helen, who would not let me pay for it and would not say why. I climbed the outside stairs of the duplex off Elm and Casey opened the door before I knocked, and I said yes on the landing, before I even got inside, because I had promised myself the whole drive up that I wouldn't make him wait one more second for it than he had to. He didn't jump or yell. He just stood in the doorway in his socks and nodded, slowly, like a little judge, and then he put his forehead against my coat and left it there, and behind him in the kitchen his mother sat down on the floor with her back against the refrigerator and covered her face.
It was not simple after that. Nothing with the county ever is. On Monday morning at eight o'clock I was sitting on a plastic chair in the Children Services office on Market Street in Youngstown, in my church dress, with my hands in my lap, across a metal desk from Mrs. Stoltz, who was about my age and had a Rolodex the size of a hubcap and a Bicentennial coffee mug with the paint worn off the eagle, and the face of a woman who had been told no by everyone in Mahoning County at least twice.
"Your license lapsed in 1977," she said.
"Yes, ma'am."
"You're single now. Your father lives with you and he's on home oxygen."
"Yes."
"You work six days a week at a diner."
"Six to three. The boy can do his homework in the back booth till I'm off. The owner said so. The cook will feed him." I swallowed. "The cook's been feeding him all week anyway."
Mrs. Stoltz looked at me over her glasses for a long time. Then she pulled a brown file folder out from under a stack of other brown file folders, and opened it, and I saw my own handwriting from 1975 on a form inside, and a Polaroid of the house on Poland Avenue, and a sheet of yellow legal paper clipped to the inside of the cover.