"Yes, ma'am."
"I made it the winter after. December. I made it on that needle there, the steel one, the number ten. I made it on my kitchen table on Pine Street with the radio on. I made it in nine nights." She was very calm. "Turn around."
He turned around, still on his knees, and her fingers went up his back to the place between his shoulder blades and found the wrong cross, the one that went left, and stayed there.
"There," she said softly. "There you are."
"Babcia," Mick said, "why'd you make it for him? After what he said. At the inquest. He said he didn't recall. He let them say it was Dziadek."
"I know what he said. I was there. I sat in the second row." Stasia took her hand off Calvert's back, and he turned around again. She was looking toward Mick, or toward where his voice was. "MichaΕ. Listen to me. Tibor told him to."
The room was very quiet.
"The night after," Stasia said. "Tibor was in the hospital in Pottsville with his ribs. They came to see him, the company. Prendergast came, and a lawyer, in a gray car. They said somebody had to have ordered the advance, and it was not going to be the company. They said it would be Tibor, or it would be Tibor and the fire boss both. They said if the fire boss wanted to keep his papers he would remember things a certain way. And Thurlow came the next morning, after them, and he sat by the bed, and he said, I won't do it, I'll tell them about the phone. And Tibor said no." She took a breath. Her hands found the needles in her lap again, by feel, and held them, not knitting. "He said, they are going to fire me anyway. They have already decided. If you say it, then they will fire you too, and they will say you are a liar who signed a bad book, and nobody will believe either one of us, and then there are two families on Pine Street with no work instead of one. You have a baby. One of us has to keep working. I was the foreman. Let me be the foreman." She stopped. "I was there. In the hospital. I heard him. Thurlow cried like a boy."