He took his hand off Boog. Boog opened one green eye at him.
"Mrs. Spratley," my father said, "is the finest lady in the city of Baltimore, and anybody who says different, you send them to me." He stood up. He put the stool back under the bench. "Go on upstairs, Jo-Jo. Do your homework. Go on."
On Tuesday, the 19th, he packed. He did it in the afternoon, while my mother was at work. He took the brown Samsonite out from under the bed, and I sat on the bed and watched him, and Boog sat on the dresser and watched him. He packed his work clothes, his flannel shirts, his long johns, the Thermos, his steel-toe boots wrapped in a towel so they wouldn't mark the shirts, his razor and his Old Spice and the photograph of my mother on the boardwalk at Ocean City in 1969 in a two-piece bathing suit that he kept in the frame of their dresser mirror. He packed his good wool socks. He packed a pocket-size New Testament his mother had given him at his confirmation, which I had never seen him open.
Every time he turned his back, Boog got in the suitcase. He'd jump down off the dresser and step in, very dignified, and turn around once and lie down on whatever was on top, a flannel shirt, a pair of pants, and look up at my father with his paws tucked. And every time, my father would lift him out, both hands under his belly, and set him on the floor, and say, "No, buddy. Not this time." And every time Boog walked in a circle and got back in. I think he did it eleven times. On the twelfth my father just stood there with his hands at his sides and let him lie there, and looked at him, and then sat down on the edge of the bed beside me and didn't say anything for a while.
"He thinks it's paper," I said. "He thinks you're reading it."
My father made a noise. It might have been a laugh. "Yeah," he said. "Yeah, I guess he does."
"Take him with you."
"Can't take a cat on a Greyhound, Jo-Jo. And Mitch's wife's got a dog. Big dumb Lab." He rubbed his face. "Besides. He's yours. He was always yours. I just brought him home."
That wasn't true. Everybody knew that wasn't true. Boog was polite to me and to my mother; he slept on my bed and took ham from my mother's fingers and let her brush him in the spring. But he belonged to my father the way your shadow belongs to you. He'd walked him to the corner every morning for four years. He'd sat in the window every afternoon waiting for the Impala. He'd gone up to Eastern Avenue on Thursday nights to sit on the library steps in the cold for two hours, and nobody had asked him to, and nobody had told him why.