Dell put his hand flat on the book. His big hand, rough across the knuckles. He kept it there.
"I knew it," he said, very quietly, not to anybody. "I knew it. I knew it."
Mick's mother came and stood behind him and put her hands on his shoulders.
Nobody said anything else for a while. Calvert stood in the doorway. He did not know whether he was supposed to stay or go, and he did not know whether this was the end of something or the beginning, and he found that he did not need to know. The judges in Harrisburg were in May. He would have to build the board again, a fourth panel, his grandfather's testimony next to Tibor Kostka's, I don't recall next to I was the foreman, and he did not yet know how he was going to write the caption for it, or whether he could stand in front of it in this sweater with strangers reading his own name. He did not know whether Dell Kostka would get the job at Frackville on Monday, or whether a Gallagher on the hiring board would look at him differently now, or the same. He did not know whether Dr. Dombrowski would call, or what the Herald would say if anybody told it, or whether the old men at the Sunoco would ever stop laughing that laugh. He did not know whether Mick would pass American History II.
Dell Kostka looked up from the book at last. His eyes were red. He looked at Calvert in the doorway, at the cardigan, at the two brothers down the front.
"You can come in," he said. "You don't have to stand in the door. Come in. Sit down. My wife'll get you a plate." He pushed the Department of Corrections application to one side, and the yellow pad with his practice questions, and made room on the table. "And then you tell me," he said. "All of it. From the start. Slow. I've got all night."
Calvert looked at Mick. Mick nodded.
So he stepped off the threshold, finally, and came into the warm kitchen, and pulled out a chair, and sat down across from them with his hands folded on the oilcloth, and he began.