"Florian Dombrowski," Mick said. "He teaches at Bloomsburg. History. His name was in the program they handed out at the door. You know who Andrew Dombrowski was? You got him typed up right there on your board, forty-one. That's his father. He's going to walk down this row in about twenty minutes and see his father's name next to my grandfather's, and then he's going to look at me, because he knows who I am, he knows my dad, everybody in this valley knows everybody, and it's going to be the whole thing again. It's going to be the whole thing. And my dad just got called back for a second interview at the new prison in Frackville. You know how long he's been out of work since the Bethlehem plant? Fourteen months. One of the guys doing the hiring up there is a Gallagher." He stopped. He breathed. "So you're going to take it down. Not because I'm going to make you. Because it's the decent thing."
Calvert stood there. He thought that this was the longest he had ever heard Mick Kostka talk. He thought, too, that every word of it was true, and that he had not thought about any of it, not really, not about the Sunoco or Robbie Chesko or the Gallaghers at the prison, in all the nights at the microfilm machine. He had thought about Bear Ridge as a thing that had happened in 1961. He had not thought about it as a thing that was still happening on Pine Street.
"I'm sorry about your dad," he said.
"I don't want you to be sorry. I want you to move."
"I know." Calvert swallowed. "Can you read the middle panel first? Just the middle. And then if you still want me to take it down, I'll—" He stopped, because he had been about to say I'll take it down, and he found that he could not say it, because it was not true. "I'll talk to Mrs. Agard," he said instead. "But read it first."
"I'm not reading anything you wrote."
"I didn't write it. My grandfather did."
Mick laughed, that same short sound. "Your grandfather was a fire boss. Fire bosses were company men. Everybody knows that. He'd write whatever they told him."
"He didn't write this for them," Calvert said. "He wrote it for himself. That's the whole point. There were two books. I can show you."