"He died," Stasia said finally. "Last year. I read it. In the Herald. I asked the girl here to read it to me twice."
"April," Ethel said.
"I wanted to go. To the funeral. I couldn't get a ride." She shook her head slightly. "Doesn't matter. He didn't come to Tibor's either. He stood across the street. I saw him. I could still see good then. I saw him standing across the street from St. Canicus in the rain with his hat in his hand, and I thought, that poor man. That poor man. He's still carrying it."
Calvert stood in the doorway in the cardigan. He found he could not move from it. It was the second time that day a doorway or an edge had held him in place, but this time it was not courage. It was the opposite.
"Babcia," Mick said. "Calvert has Mr. Beckwith's book. His notebook. From the mine. He did a project on it. On Bear Ridge. He won today. In Mahanoy, at the History Day thing. He's going to Harrisburg."
"A project," Stasia said. She turned her face toward the door. "Come here. Calvert. Come here where I can see you. I can't see you over there, you're a shadow."
He came. He knelt down by the armchair, because it seemed like the only thing to do, on the speckled linoleum, and she reached out with the hand that was not holding Ethel's and found his shoulder, and then his arm, and then the front of the cardigan, and her fingers went down the cable on the left side the way Mick's eyes had gone down it that morning, slowly, all the way, braid by braid, to the bottom hem where it split into the two separate ropes. She stopped there. Her fingers rested on the place where the ropes divided.
"I made this," she said.