Mick did not move.
"Tonight," Stasia said. "Before Monday. Before Frackville. Let him go into that room on Monday knowing. You think a man walks into a job interview better carrying a thing like this or putting it down? Go on." She pressed the book toward him, and after a long second Mick reached out and took it.
They left a little after six. In the parking lot it had gotten dark, the mountain gone black against a sky the color of slate, and the sodium lights over the circular drive had come on, orange and buzzing. Ethel Beckwith stood by the Buick with her keys in her hand.
"I'll take the board home," she said. "You go with him." She looked at Calvert in the cardigan. Then she reached up and did up the top button for him, the one he always left undone, the way she would have when he was six and going out to the bus. "Your grandfather was not a coward," she said. "Whatever he wrote in that book. He was wrong, and he knew it, and he spent his life trying to carry it so it wouldn't fall on anybody else. That's not the same thing as a coward. Don't you let anybody put that on the board."
"I won't," Calvert said.
"Good," said his grandmother, and got in the Buick, and drove away with the three pieces of the display board in the back seat and the black letters of THE BEAR RIDGE SLOPE showing in the rear window under the orange lights.
The house on Pine Street was a narrow frame double with aluminum siding and the plastic sheeting over the upstairs windows that Calvert had stared at in February, and the porch light was on. Mick parked the white Ford in the driveway behind his mother's Chevette and turned off the engine and did not get out. They sat there with the engine ticking.
"I don't know what to say to him," Mick said.