"Chocolate," he said. "I don't like chocolate."
This was a lie. Minh looked at it, and looked at Cal, and then he said, carefully, "Thank you," and Cal shrugged and went back to his peaches.
Later, walking out, Minh fell in beside him for half a block before he turned off toward the Bloomfield bridge. Neither of them said anything. It was fine. Some things you didn't need to say.
* * *
Iannelli's Shoe Repair was a narrow shop on Penn Avenue with a window full of resoled wingtips and a sign that said WHILE U WAIT in red letters that had faded to pink. Mr. Iannelli was seventy-three and had hands like walnuts and a radio on the shelf behind the counter that played KDKA all day, the news and then the talk and then, in the evenings, the Pirates, though the Pirates had lost a hundred and four games that year and Mr. Iannelli said listening to them now was a kind of penance.
Cal swept for him four afternoons a week, after school, from three-thirty to five. He swept the leather shavings and the rubber dust from around the finishing machine, and he wiped down the glass counter, and he sorted the claim tickets, and he carried the boxes of heels and soles up from the basement on the narrow wooden stairs. Mr. Iannelli paid him ten dollars every Friday in a little brown envelope, and on the envelope he wrote Calloway in fountain pen in old-fashioned slanting script, because the first day Cal had come in, Mr. Iannelli had asked his full name and Cal had told him, and Mr. Iannelli had said, "That's a name. Calloway. That's a name like a senator," and had never called him anything else since.
"Calloway," he said now, without looking up from the shoe in his vise. "You see the paper today?"
"No, sir."
"They want to put a ballpark downtown again. Another one. Like Three Rivers isn't big enough to lose in." He pulled a tack out with his teeth. "Sweep under the bench. Mrs. Kaminski's poodle got in here this morning and I don't want to know."
Cal swept under the bench.
He had forty-one dollars in a Sucrets tin under the loose board in the closet he shared with Rosie. He knew the number without having to count it, but he counted it every night anyway. He'd been saving since June. At first it had been for a bike, a used Mongoose he'd seen in the window of the pawnshop on Butler Street for sixty dollars, chrome with blue mag wheels. Then, sometime in August, without him really deciding, it had stopped being for the bike. He didn't know what it was for now. It was for whatever was coming. The pink envelope said eighty-seven dollars and fourteen cents.
He thought about it while he swept. Forty-one plus ten on Friday was fifty-one. Fifty-one plus ten the Friday after was sixty-one. The man in the truck came the Friday after that, so call it sixty-one, if nothing happened, and something always happened. Twenty-six dollars and fourteen cents short. Plus four for the Buhl.
"You're sweeping the same spot," Mr. Iannelli said.
"Sorry."