Officer Tibbetts sighed through his mustache. "Well," he said, "here's my situation. I've got a fella who says he slipped and won't make a complaint. I've got a fella who says he hit him. Assault in Ohio, when nobody wants to press it and nobody's hurt bad enough for the hospital to call me, that's a thing I can write up or a thing I can not write up." He looked at Win's eye. "You going to the hospital?"
"No, sir."
"You going to tell your father you slipped?"
Something passed over Win's face. "Yes, sir."
"Uh huh." Officer Tibbetts took out a little notebook and wrote something in it, and then he closed it. "Okonski, you're Bogdan Okonski's boy, from the open hearth."
"Yes, sir."
"Let me see that hand."
Dennis held it out. It had already started to swell along the outside, the knuckle of the little finger sunk down lower than the others in a way that hands are not supposed to look. Officer Tibbetts winced.
"That's broken," he said. "You get that looked at. Today." He put his notebook away. "I'm not writing anything up, because nobody's asking me to and I've got a lot of better things to do on a Saturday. But I'm going to say something to you, son, and I want you to hear it. I've known your father twenty years. I'm going to tell him I was out here. Not because you're in trouble with me. Because you're going to need him to know."
Then he looked at Win. "And you're going to need ice on that for about three days and a better story for your old man than slipped."
He drove away. The line of cars, by then, had mostly drifted off. You could not blame them. Nobody wants a two-dollar wash in the middle of a police situation.
Father Lisowski stood in the middle of the lot with his dish towel and looked at the three of us. He was a mild man from Pittsburgh who had been a parish priest for thirty years and had seen, he once told me, everything twice. "Well," he said finally, "I think that's the end of the car wash for today."
He did not say for the summer. He did not have to. I saw him look at the hand-painted sign, at GOD SEES THE HUBCAPS, and I saw something sad and final come into his face, and I knew.
Win did not leave right away. That is a thing I remember. He could have gotten in the Corvette and driven off, and nobody would have stopped him. Instead he stood by the cracked door, touching the edge of it with one finger, and