"He's gonna want to sit on it," my father said. His voice was rough. "You know that, right? Soon as I put it down. Every time."
He reached up and pushed the book through the hole in the screen, through the torn front door of the cottage, and laid it on the windowsill on our side of the screen, between the screen and the open sash, right in front of my knees. And Boog pulled himself back in through the tear, turned around once on the sill, and lay down on it. Square in the middle. Paws tucked. And looked up at my father through the hole with his green Coke-bottle eyes like this was a reasonable and even generous thing to do.
My father put his forehead against the side of our house, against the formstone next to the window, and made a sound I'd never heard a grown man make.
"Get off it, buddy," he said into the wall. "Come on. Not tonight. Please."
I lifted Boog. Both hands under his belly, the way my father did. Sixteen pounds of him, warm and humming and furious about it. I held him against my chest, and my mother leaned past me and picked up the book.
On the cover, in plain black letters, it said READING FOR LIVING, and under that, BOOK TWO. There was a drawing of a man in a work shirt sitting at a kitchen table, and a woman beside him pointing at something on a page. In the corner was a purple stamp that said ENOCH PRATT FREE LIBRARY — ADULT READING PROGRAM, and under the stamp, in ballpoint, in a neat slanting schoolteacher's hand: T. Dombek. Thursdays 7–9. Mrs. E. Spratley.
My mother didn't say anything. She opened it. Inside were pages of big print, short words, short sentences, the kind of pages I'd had in first grade, except the pictures were of grown people doing grown-people things: a man at a bus stop, a woman at a bank window, a man reading a sign that said EXIT. All down the margins, in pencil, in my father's careful separate letters, the same words were written over and over. Words I knew he knew how to say. BUS. WORK. STEEL. HOUSE. And in some places, in the margins and on the insides of the covers, our names. ROSALIE. ROSALIE. ROSALIE, fifteen times down the edge of one page, each one a little straighter than the one before. JOEY. JOEY. And one whole page, near the back, where the paper was soft and fuzzy from being erased and written on again, where it said BOOG in big pencil capitals, a whole column of BOOG, and in the middle of the column, a smudged gray paw print where a cat had walked across it before it was dry.
Folded in the back of the workbook, used as a bookmark, was the Greyhound ticket to Norfolk.
"Ted," my mother said. She said it so quietly it was barely a word.