"I know that." He turned to me, and his face was red now, high on the cheekbones, the way it gets when he is fighting not to cry, which I had seen exactly once before, at the funeral, when I went out of the church laughing and he followed me and found me on the steps and we sat together and he did not cry and did not cry and then did. "Do you know what I did, the year after? I was seventeen. I went to his sentencing in a suit I borrowed from Mr. Pietrzak next door and I read a statement Mom couldn't read because she couldn't stand up. I went to his parole hearings. Three of them. At Albion, at the state prison, I drove out there with Mom in the passenger seat throwing up into a Giant Eagle bag, and I stood up in a room with a drop ceiling and I told five strangers why that man should stay in a cage. I described Dad. I described you. Your arm. Your face. The nightmares. How you wouldn't get in a car for a year. How you couldn't stand the sound of a radio. I read the medical reports out loud in front of him, Lark. I made him look at pictures." He was breathing hard. "I gave up State College. I lived at home and went to Behrend and worked at the Country Fair on Buffalo Road so Mom could keep the house. And I did that, all of that, so that you could grow up and go to Columbus and get a job and have a life where that man's name was just a thing in a newspaper. So you could forget. So that somebody in this family got to forget." His voice broke on the last word. "And then I walk into the post office and he's got his hand on yours."
I didn't say anything for a while. I looked at him, at the anchors on his tie, and thought about him at seventeen in Mr. Pietrzak's suit. I had never thought about that before.
"I didn't forget," I said finally. "You know that, right? You couldn't do that for me. Nobody could have."
"You don't remember any of it. The doctors said—"
"I don't remember the crash. I remember everything around it. I remember the pink coat. I remember the radio. I remember Mom standing at the window. I read the folder in her desk when I was twelve." He flinched. "I didn't forget, Eamon. I just didn't talk. I thought that's what we did. I thought that was the family business."
He put both hands on the steering wheel and held it, ten and two, like a student driver, and lowered his forehead until it rested on his knuckles.
"Can I ask you something?" I said.
He nodded without lifting his head.
"In there. When he saw me. He said he didn't know who I was until I said something. And I didn't— What did he mean? What did I say?"
Eamon lifted his head. "What did you say to him?"
"Nothing. He was having trouble writing out the money order. People were being awful. He was starting to panic. I could see it. So I said what I always say." I shrugged. "'Look at me, not at them.' It's a thing I say at work. They put it on a mug for me."