"You eat, or you stand there and watch her eat?"
"I ate."
She looked at him a second longer. She was twenty-nine. He knew that because he'd done the math once, from her birthday on the calendar, and it had surprised him; she didn't look old, exactly, but she looked like she'd been carrying something for a long time without anywhere to put it down. She had his same brown hair, though hers was longer and usually up, and his same habit of pressing her lips together when she was deciding whether to say something.
"There's a paper," Rosie announced. "For the Buhl. It's on the table."
"Okay, baby."
"It's four dollars but I can bring lunch."
His mother's eyes went to the paper, and then, very briefly, to the sugar canister, and then back to Rosie, and she smiled with her whole face. "Okay. I'll look at it."
* * *
St. Casimir's was six blocks down and three over, past Pulaski's bar and the bakery that smelled like poppy seed and the house with the Virgin Mary in a bathtub in the front yard. Cal walked Rosie to the side door of the lower school and waited until she went in, which took a while because she had to tell the crossing guard about the planetarium. Then he walked the rest of the way to the upper school by himself.
Travis Kolb was by the bike rack, which was where Travis Kolb always was.
"Hey, G.I. Joe," Travis said. "Hey, Dunn. You going to war?"
Cal kept walking.
"Where'd you get that, the Army-Navy store or the garbage?" Travis was not big but he had a big older brother, which was better than being big. Two of his friends laughed, the way you laughed when you were glad it wasn't you. "Hey. I'm talking to you. Your mom get that out of somebody's trash at work?"
Cal stopped.