He came over to the window and put his hand on top of my head, the whole palm, the way he did when I was little, and held it there. He bent down and kissed my hair. He put one finger on top of Boog's head, between the ears, and Boog pushed up into it hard.
"Be good, buddy," he said. I didn't know which one of us he meant. Then he picked up the suitcase and opened the door, and the cold came in, and he went down the marble steps, and turned left toward Eastern Avenue.
And you know the rest of that part. Boog went at the glass. I threw up the sash. The painted screen tore through the middle of the cottage, through the roof and down the front door, and Boog came out through it to his shoulders and screamed. And my father stopped under the streetlight three doors down and set the suitcase on the sidewalk and turned around and reached into his coat.
What he took out was a book.
Not a real book, not at first glance. It was thin, thinner than a TV Guide, with a soft paper cover that had been light blue once and was now the gray-blue of dishwater, bent in half lengthwise from being carried in a coat pocket and curled at all four corners. He held it up. He didn't hold it up to show us, I don't think. I think he just took it out and held it in front of him under the streetlight the way you'd hold a lantern, like it was the only thing he had to see by. Then he left the suitcase standing on the sidewalk and walked back toward the house.
Boog stopped screaming the second the book came out of the coat. Just like that. He hung there through the hole in the cottage with his front legs out on the street side of the screen and his back legs scrabbling on the sill, and went quiet, and stared at it.
"Joey," my mother said behind me. "What is he doing? What's he got?"
"I don't know."
She came across the room. I felt her come up behind me, felt her hand land on my shoulder. Together we watched my father come back past Mrs. Florkowski's steps and stop on the sidewalk in front of our window, so close I could see the breath coming out of him in the cold. He had to look up a little; the bottom of our front window was about level with his chest. He looked at the cat sticking out through the torn picture his father had painted. He looked at me. He looked at my mother.