"Where do you go on Thursday nights?"
He looked up at that. He looked at her, and then for a second he looked at me on the stairs, and I'll never forget his face, because it was the face of a man standing on the edge of the roof of a building, deciding.
"The hall," he said.
"You're a liar," my mother said quietly. "I called the hall. There's nobody at the hall on Thursday nights. They lock it at five."
He didn't say anything else. He turned and went down to the basement and shut the door, and after a minute Boog came out from under the dining room table and went to the basement door and sat in front of it and cried until my father opened it six inches and let him through.
After that, the house went cold. I don't mean the radiators; I mean the house. My parents spoke to each other about things that had to be spoken about: the gas bill, whether there was milk, what time my mother was working. My mother took every shift Haussner's would give her. My father went out on Thursday nights anyway, at a quarter to seven, without saying where, and my mother didn't ask, and when he came back she was already upstairs with the door shut. He slept on the couch some nights. Boog slept on top of him, on his chest, like a sandbag.
Then the woman called.
It was a Friday, the 15th of November. I know because it was the day of the school Thanksgiving food drive and I'd carried four cans of Libby's creamed corn to Holy Rosary in my bookbag. My mother was home that afternoon, between shifts, and my father had gone to Mr. Florkowski's to help him change a starter. The phone rang and my mother answered it, standing at the counter with a dishrag over her shoulder, and I was at the table doing long division with Boog lying on my worksheet.
"Hello?" she said. And then: "Yes, this is his wife." And then she was quiet for a long time, listening. Her face changed while she listened. It went careful and smooth, the way it did at Haussner's when a customer was being rude and she was deciding whether to say something.