Mick looked at him. "You walked all the way out here to tell me about the chili?"
"No."
"I know you didn't." Mick looked back at the ridge. After a while he moved over on the tailgate, not much, maybe a foot. Calvert understood that this was an invitation and sat down on the cold metal, with the shoebox on his knees, and they both looked at the ridge.
"Dombrowski came by," Calvert said.
"Yeah. I saw him through the door window." Mick's jaw moved. "What'd he say?"
Calvert told him. He told him about the lamp house and the bench and I was the foreman. He told him about the binder and page eighty-one. He told it as plainly as he could, the way he would have written it in a process paper, and Mick listened without interrupting, without looking at him, and when Calvert got to the part about Dr. Dombrowski saying that he had noticed at fifteen that Tibor Kostka didn't say yes, Mick put his face down into his hands and sat like that, bent over his knees on the tailgate, for a long time.
Calvert did not touch him. He did not know if that was the right thing. He sat there with the shoebox and looked at the culm banks, and a school bus went by on the road below the lot with nobody on it but the driver, and a crow landed on the fence by the bus garage and looked at them and left.
"My dad was nine," Mick said at last, through his hands. Then he sat up and wiped his face with the sleeve of his sweatshirt, once, hard, the way you wipe off a mat. "When it happened. He was nine. He's never said one word about it. Not one, my whole life. You ask him about my grandpa and he says, he drove a bread truck. That's it. He drove a bread truck. Like that's the whole thing." He laughed, but not the short laugh from inside; something worse. "I used to think he was ashamed. You know? I used to think that's why he didn't talk about it. Because his dad was the guy who killed four people. So I figured, okay, that's what we are. We're the family that the guy came from. You just keep your head down and you work twice as hard and you pin everybody, and nobody can say anything." He looked at his hands. "Then I read your board."