He stood just inside the door looking at the washers. I don't think he'd ever been in a laundromat. He had a woman at the house who did that.
"Theodore Brzezinski?" he said.
My mother stood up. She came around the counter, wiping her hands on her slacks, and she stood next to me, not in front of me but next to me, the way she'd stood next to me at my father's sister's funeral when I was ten.
"I'm his mother," she said. "Irene."
"Gil Callahan." He held out his hand and she shook it. The dealership handshake, a good firm one, two pumps. He looked at her and then at me. "I'm not here to cause trouble, Mrs. Brzezinski. I'm here because my wife said if I didn't come down here she'd come herself and tell your son everything I should have told him, and I'd rather do my own talking. I usually do."
He sat down on one of the orange plastic chairs by the change machine, which was too small for him, so his knees came up. He took off his Siena hat and held it in both hands and turned it around and around. Dryer number six was running a load of RPI sweatshirts and the drum went thump, thump, thump the whole time he talked.
He didn't say he was sorry. I want to be accurate. He talked about his father, the gas station in Watervliet, the dirt court, the balls. He said his father used to say, "'Cause you think you're tough?" every time young Gil tried to quit, and it used to make him so mad he'd stay out there until his hands bled, just to prove it, and he'd always thought that was how a man got made. He said he'd started three years at Siena and those were the only three years of his life that nobody handed him, and that he'd spent the thirty years since smiling into a camera and he'd wanted Brent to have something that was his. He said, "I didn't know about the eye. That's not true. I knew, and I decided I didn't. That's worse, and I know that's worse." He said Dr. Okonkwo had shown him a picture of the inside of his son's eye, a red-orange circle like a planet, with a pale ragged scar in the bottom of it the shape of a thumbprint, and he had looked at it and understood that he was the one who'd thrown that ball.