Ethel Beckwith had her free hand over her mouth.
"So I made him the sweater," Stasia said. "Because I was angry. I was so angry, Michał. At everybody. At Tibor for being proud. At Thurlow for saying yes. At the company. At God. And I thought, I will make the fire boss a sweater, and I will put the brothers in it, at the bottom, so every time he puts it on, he has to know that's what they were. Two men who went in together. And I put the wrong cross in the back, where he can't see it, but everybody else can. So he would always know somebody behind him could see." She laughed, a small dry sound. "That's a mean thing to knit into a sweater. I was fifty-five. I was mean. And then he wore it. He wore it to bring us the groceries every Saturday for sixteen years. Every Saturday. In the summer, even. In August, Michał, in that sweater, carrying bags up my porch, sweating like a horse. And Tibor would say to him, Beckwith, take that thing off, you look like a fool, and he wouldn't. He would just stand there in it and hand me the bags." Her face crumpled for a moment and smoothed out again. "So I stopped being angry. Eventually. You can't stay angry at a man in a wool sweater in August. It's not possible."
Nobody spoke. Out in the hallway a cart went by, rattling, and somebody's television was playing the Wheel of Fortune music.
"He wrote it down," Calvert said. His voice did not sound like his own. "In the book. December 1961. He wrote, she made it with the mistake in. He wrote, that's so I remember." He swallowed. "He remembered. He never stopped."
"No," Stasia said. "I know. That was the trouble with both of them. Neither one would ever stop."
She held out her hand. Calvert understood, after a second, and opened the shoebox and took the logbook out of the Ziploc bag and put it in her hand. She held it in her lap on top of the red yarn. She could not read it. She ran her thumb along the edge of the pages, along the cloth cover gone black at the corners, and then she opened it somewhere in the middle and put her fingers flat on the page, on the pencil, as though she could read it that way, the way she knitted.
"What are you going to do with this?" she said. "This project. In Harrisburg."
"I don't know," Calvert said. "I was going to—Mick says I should put up the testimony. My grandfather's. Next to your husband's. Both of them. So it's not just picking a different person to blame."