I don't think she meant it. I believe that now. I think she said it the way you throw something on the floor in an argument, to see if anybody will pick it up. I think she wanted him to be shocked enough to finally say something, anything. And he didn't. He rinsed his hands. He turned off the water. He dried his hands on the dish towel, very carefully, between each finger, the way he did everything, and he hung the towel back on the oven handle and straightened it.
"Okay," he said.
"Okay?"
"Mitch has been asking me to come down to Norfolk," my father said. "He's got a drywall crew. Navy housing. He says there's work through spring. He says he could use a guy who knows how to work." He finally turned around. "I'll go down there. I'll send money. It's better, Ro. It's—maybe it's better."
"Better," said my mother.
"You don't need to read nothing to hang drywall," my father said, and he said it so quietly, and so strangely, that I didn't understand it and I don't think my mother heard it at all, because she was already crying, and walking out of the kitchen, and going up the stairs.
He called Mitch that night from the payphone outside the Royal Farms store on Eastern Avenue, not from our kitchen. I know because I followed him. I stayed half a block back with my hands jammed in my jacket, and I watched him stand in the little metal hood of the phone under the store lights, feeding in dimes and quarters, talking with his head down and his free hand pressed flat against the side of the box like he was holding it up. Boog had followed him too. Boog sat on the curb beside the phone with his tail around his feet and looked up at my father the whole time, and when my father hung up and turned around, Boog stood up and walked home beside him, and I had to run down the alley to get back to the house before they did.
Mitch was my father's first cousin, his aunt's son, a big loud man with a beard who had joined the Navy at seventeen and never come back to Baltimore except for funerals. He lived in Norfolk with a second wife and a boat. He'd been telling my father to come down there since the spring. The bus left the Greyhound station on Fayette Street at 10:40 on Tuesday night and got into Norfolk around six in the morning. Mitch would pick him up. My father bought the ticket on Monday. It cost thirty-one dollars, which he borrowed from Mr. Florkowski, who gave it to him on the steps and then went inside and, I found out later, cried at his own kitchen table so hard that Mrs. Florkowski had to make him a cup of tea.
I want to tell you that I did something. That I said the right thing, or grabbed the suitcase, or ran up Eastern Avenue to the library on Monday afternoon and found out everything. I didn't. I was eleven. I did the things eleven-year-olds do. I hid in my room. I was mean to Dewey Stelmach at recess for no reason and he pushed me into the fence and I didn't push back. I lay on my bed with Boog on my chest and asked him what was going on, and he purred at me like a truck idling and put his paw on my mouth.