then he walked over to the drain grate, crouched, and pried the soggy five-dollar bill out of it. He unfolded it and smoothed it flat against his knee. Then he walked over to the folding table and put it in the coffee can Mrs. Prochazka used for the parish's share.
"For the roof," he said to Father Lisowski. He did not look at me or Dennis.
Then he got into the Corvette and drove away, slowly, the cracked door shut tight, the top still down, the left side of his face turning darker by the minute in the July sun.
Dennis sat down on the curb of the lot. He was holding his hand in his lap, and he had started to shake, not a lot, just a little, the way you shake when you come in out of the cold.
"Hutch," he said.
I sat down beside him. I did not know what to say, so I didn't say anything. Across the lot, Mrs. Prochazka was folding up the table with quick angry snaps. The radio had moved on to a commercial for a mattress store in Sheffield Lake.
"He said keep my hands in one piece," Dennis said. "That's the only thing he asked. Keep your nose clean and your hands in one piece." He laughed, a terrible small laugh. "I did both in one shot. That's efficient, right? That's got to count for something."
"Dennis."
"It's fine." He was not looking at me. "It's fine, Rollie. He shouldn't have said that about your dad."
"I didn't need you to do that."
He looked at me then. "I know you didn't," he said. "That's sort of what made me mad."
Bogdan Okonski came and got us in his pickup an hour later. Officer Tibbetts had driven straight to the mill gate and had them call him off the floor, which in 1986, at U.S. Steel in Lorain, with half the men on short weeks and the other half waiting to be, was not a small thing to do to a man. He arrived still in his work clothes, gray with mill dust, his hard hat on the seat beside him. He did not yell. Mr. Okonski never yelled. He looked at Dennis's hand, then at Dennis's face, then at me, and said, "Get in," and we got in, and he drove us to the emergency room at Elyria Memorial without saying a word.
I sat in the waiting room for three hours while they X-rayed Dennis's hand and set it and put it in a plaster cast that went from his knuckles to halfway up his forearm, with his ring finger and pinky taped together and bent at an angle like he was perpetually about to hold a teacup. Mr. Okonski sat in the plastic chair across from me with his hard hat on his knees and looked at the floor.