I did try once. On Monday night, after supper, I found my father in the basement. I'd never gone all the way down there on a Thursday night or any night when he was down there with the door shut, because it felt like his, the way the front window felt like Boog's. But this was Monday, and the door was open, and I went down.
The basement of our house was like every basement on Decker Avenue: low ceiling, the furnace like a big gray octopus in the middle, my mother's wringer washer that she still used for sheets, the coal bin from the old days that my father had turned into a storage closet, and along the back wall his workbench under a single bulb with a pull chain. The shelves he'd built in the summer held paint cans and jars of screws sorted by size and a coffee can full of the bottle caps Boog collected and left on the stairs. My father was standing at the workbench. When he heard me on the stairs he did something quick with his hands, and when I got to the bottom there was nothing on the workbench but a coffee cup and a roll of electrical tape and a lamp he'd been rewiring for Mrs. Florkowski.
"Hey, Jo-Jo," he said. He was the only one who ever called me that.
"Hey."
Boog was on the workbench too, lying on his side in the circle of light like he'd been poured there. He was lying on top of something. I saw the corner of a piece of paper sticking out from under his belly, lined paper, the kind from a school tablet, with pencil on it. My father saw me see it. He put his hand flat on Boog's side, gently, and left it there.
"You want to help me with this lamp?" he said.
"Don't go," I said.
It came out like that. I hadn't planned it.
My father looked at me for a long time. Then he pulled the stool out from under the workbench with his foot and sat down on it so his face was level with mine. Up close he smelled like he always smelled: Old Spice and coffee and that hot metal smell that the mill had put into his skin so deep that months of being laid off hadn't got it out yet.