They got out of the truck.
Dell Kostka was at the kitchen table when they came in the back door. He was a big man, bigger than Mick, gone soft around the middle the way men did after a year out of work, in a flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and he had a stack of papers in front of him and a pencil behind his ear and a cup of coffee gone cold at his elbow. Calvert saw that the papers were the application for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, Department of Corrections, and a list of questions in his own handwriting on a yellow pad, practice questions, Why do you want this job, What would you do if, and he understood with a jolt that this man had been sitting at this table practicing just the way Calvert had practiced in his bathroom mirror. Mick's mother, a thin tired woman in a Weis Markets smock, was at the stove with her back to them, and she turned around and saw Calvert, and saw the cardigan, and the spoon stopped in her hand.
Dell looked up. He looked at his son. Then he looked at Calvert, and at the cardigan, and something passed over his face very fast and was gone, and he put the pencil down.
"Who's this," he said.
"This is Calvert Beckwith," Mick said. "From school. He'sā" He stopped. He looked at Calvert. Calvert stood in the doorway between the back porch and the kitchen, on the threshold, on the worn place in the linoleum where twenty-six years of boots had gone in and out, and did not move. Mick looked at him standing there, and took a breath, and turned back to his father.
"Dad," he said. "He's Mr. Beckwith's grandson. The fire boss. He brought something. Babcia says you have to see it tonight. Before Monday."
He put the logbook on the table on top of the Department of Corrections application.
Dell Kostka looked at the book for a long time. He did not touch it. His wife had put the spoon down on the stove and turned off the burner, and the kitchen was very quiet except for the refrigerator humming and a dog barking somewhere down the alley. Then he reached out and opened the green cloth cover with one thick finger, and turned the pages, slowly, not reading yet, just turning, until he came to the place where Calvert had put a slip of paper in to mark it. March ninth. He looked at it. Calvert watched him read it the way he had watched Mick read it, and Dr. Dombrowski, and the old woman in the church coat touch the name. He watched him get to T.K. refused. He watched him get to the bottom of the page.