At some point a nurse's aide came through the waiting room pushing a cart of linens, and it was not my mother, because my mother worked nights, but for a second my heart jumped anyway, and I realized I was going to have to tell her. That the car wash was done. That the Dart money had stopped at three hundred and nine dollars and thirty-five cents, counting my father's two hundred and my sixty-one and the forty-eight that was my share of four Saturdays after the parish's third. That it was going to stay there.
"Rollie," said Mr. Okonski, without looking up.
"Yes, sir."
"What did the Conway boy say?"
I told him. I told him all of it, the Dart, the five dollars, my mother's shoes in Win's voice, and then the part about my father. Mr. Okonski listened without moving. When I was done he nodded slowly.
"That's an ugly thing to say to a boy," he said.
"Yes, sir."
"And my son broke his hand on it." He turned the hard hat over in his big gray hands. "When I was his age, a man said a thing to me on the line at the old Republic plant in Cleveland. About my mother. I hit him. I was eighteen. I lost the job. It took me two years to get on at Lorain." He was quiet a while. "I told Dennis that story when he was ten so he'd never have to learn it himself. Looks like he wanted his own copy."
I did not know what to say to that.
"He did it for you," Mr. Okonski said. It was not an accusation. It was just a fact he was setting on the table between us, to look at.
"I know."
"You going to let that be for nothing?"
I did not understand the question then. I think now he meant something specific, and that he was trusting me to work it out.
Dennis came out a little after four with his arm in a sling and his face pale and set. The doctor had told him six weeks in the cast, maybe eight, then therapy, and that if he wanted full grip back, real grip, the kind a man needs to hold a body hammer all day, he had to do every bit of the therapy, and even then there were no promises. Fifth metacarpal fractures, the doctor said, healed fine for most people's purposes. Most people's purposes did not include eight hours a day of metalwork.