"Nothing's wrong with my face."
"Something's wrong with your face, Dodie. You got that look. The one you had when you were a little girl and the Hlavaty dog died."
I got two plates out of the cupboard. We were having pierogi from the church freezer sale, potato and cheese, and I put the water on and got the onions out, because you cannot eat pierogi in the Kovach house without onions fried in butter, it is practically a sacrament. I cut an onion and told him about the boy, at least the shape of it. The whisper. The grilled cheese. The questions.
Pop listened the way he did, with his eyes half closed, breathing. When I got to "Do you have kids," he opened his eyes.
"What'd you tell him?"
"I told him no."
He waited.
"I told him not anymore," I said, to the onion.
Pop didn't say anything for a while. The water started to talk in the pot. On Wheel of Fortune somebody bought a vowel. Then Pop said, "Huh," which in his language could mean almost anything, and went back to the Jumble, and the word was SCOUR, I remember, because I looked over his shoulder later and saw he'd gotten it wrong, he'd put SOURC, which wasn't anything, and he was never wrong on the Jumble, never once.
I lay awake that night. I lay awake most nights by then, listening to Pop breathe through the wall, and doing the arithmetic. The mortgage was two months behind. The Dollar Bank letters had gone from blue envelopes to white envelopes with a red stripe. The property tax was due in January. Helen had cut my hours in the summer and put them back in the fall and I could see in her face that she was going to cut them again after Christmas, or close, or sell to the man from Akron who'd come in twice in a camel-hair coat and walked around the dining room knocking on the walls. Pop's oxygen bill was a hundred and twelve dollars a month after Medicare. I made two dollars and one cent an hour, plus tips, and tips in Struthers in 1984 were mostly quarters and kindness, and you could not pay the Dollar Bank in kindness, although God knows I had thought about trying.
But that night I wasn't doing that arithmetic. I was thinking about a boy saying what's your real one, and Brother saying funny like he knew you, and I was thinking that I had told a nine-year-old stranger more truth in one afternoon than I'd told anybody in a year, and I could not for the life of me work out why.