"I know you do. I know where they are. I used to take them out sometimes when you were at work and look at them. Try and figure them out." He rubbed his face with both hands. "Chet had nice handwriting. I couldn't figure out a single word."
I was still holding Boog. He'd gone limp and heavy in my arms the way he did when he decided to tolerate something, and he was purring, loud, and watching my father through the hole.
"The sixty dollars," my mother said.
"Eye doctor up on Eastern. Forty. I thought—I don't know what I thought. I thought maybe it was my eyes. All these years. Maybe it was just my eyes and I could get a pair of glasses and it'd all come clear." He shook his head. "It ain't my eyes. My eyes are better than yours. He said so. And the rest was the books. The book you got there and the one before it and a dictionary for when I get good enough to use a dictionary, which Mrs. Spratley says is not yet but someday. She's a retired lady. She taught English at Dunbar High School for thirty-one years. She does it for free, at the library, Thursday nights, for people like me. There's six of us, Ro. Me, and a guy from the Point who worked the open hearth, and a lady who cleans at Hopkins, and a kid who just got out of the Army, and a man from Greece who can read Greek fine and can't read a word of English, and a grandmother from Dundalk who wants to read the Bible her husband left her. And me." He took a breath. "Mrs. Spratley says I'm her best student. She says I'm the hardest worker she ever had. Thirty-one years."
"Why didn't you tell me?" my mother said. "Ted, why in God's name didn't you just tell me?"
My father looked at her through the screen for a long time. Across the street, the Iannuzzis' door had opened, and Mrs. Iannuzzi was standing in it in her housecoat. Mrs. Florkowski's front room light was on, and her painted screen, which showed a lighthouse, had a shadow standing behind it that was obviously Mrs. Florkowski. My father didn't care. I don't think he even saw them.
"You know who painted this screen?" he said.
"Your father," my mother said, confused.
"My father couldn't read either," my father said. "Not a word. Not in Polish, not in English. You know why he painted screens? Because it was money you could make with your hands that nobody was ever gonna hand you a piece of paper for. He painted this whole block. Half of Highlandtown. My mother read him everything. Every bill, every letter, the newspaper out loud on Sundays. And nobody ever said it. Not one time, not in our house, not out loud. You just didn't say it. When I was in school, at Holy Rosary, the nuns figured I was stupid, so they put me in the back and hit my hands with a ruler till I learned how to keep my mouth shut and sit still. Then they figured I was a good boy. Then at Patterson they put me in shop and on the line for football and I passed everything because I could build anything you put in front of me, and the teachers were glad to get rid of me. Then I went to the Point. First day, there's a written safety test. A man named Tony Wolanski, God rest him, read it to me in the locker room before I went in, all the questions, and I memorized it. I memorized everything after that. Twenty-three years. I memorized the line. I memorized the bus. I memorized the menus at the Double-T. I memorized you, Ro, how you read things to me without even knowing you were doing it." He looked down. "And then you married me. The smartest girl in Brooklyn Park. You could've had anybody. And I figured the day you found out, that would be the day. You'd look at me different. You'd look at me like those nuns. So I didn't say it, and I didn't say it, and then it was the size of the house."