"Good," said his mother.
"But I'm going to ask you for something. And you can say no to that too."
She waited.
"Cal tells me you left school at sixteen. Tenth grade. He tells me you do the crossword in pen. He tells me you read the dictionary when you can't sleep." Mr. Calloway turned his coffee cup in its saucer. "Margaret sat on the board of the Blind Association for five years. She used to say the hardest thing to find wasn't money. It was people who could read aloud like they meant it. Court transcripts. Contracts. Textbooks for blind students going to college. They pay readers, and they pay them better than the Gulf Tower pays to clean toilets. They want a high school diploma. The equivalency courses at the community college are forty dollars a term." He set the cup down. "I'll lend you the forty dollars. A loan. You'll pay it back. Ten dollars a month, first Sunday of every month, and you bring it to me yourself, and you stay for dinner. That's the interest. Mrs. Petrakis cooks for twelve and there's only me."
His mother looked at him for a long time.
"And Cal keeps the Saturdays," she said. "If he wants. But he asks me first. Every single time."
"Agreed."
"And you pay him what you'd pay anybody. Not a nickel more."
"I never have."
"And nobody gives anybody any limousine rides up this street again, because Mrs. Washington is going to be talking about it till Easter."
Mr. Calloway smiled. "Booker will be heartbroken."
His mother put out her hand across the table, and remembered, and reached over and took his hand from beside his cup and shook it. And that was the deal. Cal saw his mother's chin come up a little as she did it, the way it did when she signed her name with the loop on the D.
* * *