He was quiet a moment.
"I'm going to say something and I want you to think about it before you answer. I had a young man who came to the house on Saturdays and read me the papers. The Post-Gazette, the Wall Street Journal, whatever letters had come. He went off to Penn State in August and I haven't replaced him. I've had a dozen people interviewed and I sent them all away. They read to me like I was a child. Or like I was dead." He turned his face toward Cal. "I pay five dollars an hour. Saturday mornings, nine to noon. Booker would drive you. It's a job. It's work. It isn't charity, and if you're bad at it I'll tell you, and if you're still bad at it I'll let you go. Do you understand the difference?"
Cal did. He understood it in his stomach. Fifteen dollars a Saturday. He did the math before he could stop himself. Three Saturdays and the pink envelope was gone.
"I'd have to ask my mom," he said.
"Yes," said Mr. Calloway. "You would."
* * *
He didn't ask her.
He would think about that for a long time afterward—about how easy it had been not to. He told her Mr. Iannelli needed him Saturday mornings now, to help with the backlog before winter, and she was so tired when he said it, standing at the stove in her smock, that she only nodded and said, "Good. That's good. Don't let him work you to death," and turned the pork chops. And that was all it took. A sentence. He went to bed that night and lay under the blanket and felt the lie in his chest like a swallowed stone.
On Saturday Booker picked him up in front of Iannelli's, which was closed, at a quarter to nine, in the limousine.
Up close, inside, it was like a living room. The seats were gray leather, soft as a glove, and there was carpet on the floor and a little wooden cabinet with glasses in it and a telephone—a telephone, in a car—and the windows were so dark that Penn Avenue went by outside like a movie with the brightness turned down. Cal sat in the exact middle of the back seat with his knapsack on his lap and didn't touch anything.
"You can lean back," Booker said in the mirror. "It won't bite."
Cal leaned back an inch.
"He's been up since five," Booker said after a while, turning onto the bridge. "Had Mrs. Petrakis lay out three different jackets. Asked me twice what time it was. Asked me if I thought you'd come." He glanced in the mirror again. "I've driven that man eleven years. I drove him before he lost the last of it and I drove him after, and I drove him to the cemetery for Mrs. Calloway, and since then I've mostly driven him from the house to the doctor and back. He doesn't go to the store anymore. He doesn't go anywhere. Two weeks ago he climbs out of my car at a gas station and takes a cab to the Greyhound terminal by himself for the first time in nearly thirteen years. Then he goes back the next Saturday, and the next." He was quiet a while. "I don't know what you are to him, son. But you treat him right."