* * *
The Duquesne Light office was on Sixth Avenue, with a long counter and a line of people holding pink envelopes. On the Monday before the truck was due, Cal stood in that line after school with eighty-seven dollars and fourteen cents in a bread bag inside his knapsack: forty-one from the Sucrets tin, forty-five from three Saturdays, and a dollar fourteen from Mr. Iannelli's envelope. He'd taken the pink envelope out from under the sugar canister that morning while his mother slept, and slid Mr. Calloway's card back under in its place, so the canister wouldn't sit crooked.
The woman at the window counted the money twice and stamped the bill PAID and gave him a receipt. He walked out onto Sixth Avenue feeling, for about a block and a half, like he could fly.
Then he got home, and his mother was sitting at the kitchen table with the telephone receiver still in her hand and the cord stretched across the room, and the dial tone buzzing out of it.
"I called them," she said. "To set up the plan. I've been on hold since one o'clock. And the girl finally comes on and looks it up and says, oh, no, ma'am, that account's paid in full. Paid in cash. This afternoon. By a young man." She hung up the phone, slowly. "Where'd you get eighty-seven dollars, Cal?"
He told her. All of it. The Saturdays, the limousine in front of Iannelli's, the library in the big gray house, the curtains, Mrs. Petrakis, the forget-me-not. He didn't leave anything out, because he found that once he started he couldn't, and by the end he was crying, which he hadn't done in front of her since he was nine.
She didn't yell. That was the worst part. She sat there and listened with her hands folded on the oilcloth, and when he was done she was quiet a long time.
"You lied to me," she said. "Four Saturdays. You looked me in the face."
"I know."
"I'd have said no."
"I know. That's why."
She closed her eyes. "That's why," she repeated. She sounded about a hundred years old. "Go to your room, Cal. I can't look at you right now."
He went. He lay on the bottom bunk with Rosie whispering at him from the top—"What'd you do? What'd you do?"—and didn't answer, and listened to his mother in the kitchen not making any sound at all. Then he heard the drawer open, the one with the bills, and then the sugar canister scrape on the counter, and then nothing for a long time.