"Cal, I'm asking you to drop it."
"But he said—"
"I know what he said." She turned around. Her face was white and her eyes were wet and furious, and he didn't think the fury was at him, exactly, but he was the only one in the room. "You know what he's going to think? He's going to think I sent you. He's going to think some cleaning lady from Polish Hill sent her kid down there with a sob story to shake him down. I know how those people think. You think he got that car being stupid?"
"He didn't think that. He wasn't like that. He—"
"You spent twenty minutes with him. You don't know what he's like." She came back to the table and picked up the card, finally, by its edge, between two fingers. She looked at it for a long time. Her thumb moved over the Braille dots the way his had. Then she lifted the sugar canister and put the card under it, on top of the pink envelope from Duquesne Light, and set the canister back down.
"We are not calling him," she said. "And you're not going back down there. And that's the end of it. Go get your sister washed up for dinner."
* * *
It was not the end of it.
On Monday, after Iannelli's, instead of walking home Cal took the 54C bus to Oakland and got off in front of the Carnegie Library, the big gray building with the names of dead men carved around the top—GALILEO, SHAKESPEARE, MICHELANGELO—and the dinosaur museum around the back. He returned his overdue book and paid the forty cents, which hurt. Then he went to the reference desk.
The librarian was a young woman with enormous round glasses and a sweater with reindeer on it two months early. Her nameplate said MISS FEENEY.
"I need to look somebody up," Cal said. "Somebody in Pittsburgh. In the newspaper. From a long time ago."
"How long ago?"
"I don't know. Like 1972. Or '73."
Miss Feeney looked at him over the giant glasses, and then she smiled like he'd made her day. "Microfilm," she said. "Come with me."