My mother had begun to cry, silently, the tears just running.
"And then they took the job," my father said. "And the job was the only thing I had that didn't need it. And then the letter came, and you were so happy, Ro. You circled it on the calendar. You told everybody. You told your sister. And I walked into that room on the fourteenth and I knew if I came home and told you I couldn't read the test, you'd know all of it. Twenty years of it, all at once. I couldn't do that to you. I'd rather you thought I was a bum. A bum you can be mad at. A bum you can throw out."
"I wasn't throwing you out," my mother said. "Oh, Ted. I wasn't throwing you out."
"So I went up to the library," my father said, as if she hadn't spoken, as if he had to get all of it said now before it bolted itself to the floor again. "On a Thursday in October. I walked past it every day for a month. There's a sign in the window about the reading program, I didn't know what it said, I just knew it was there. I knew what it was. I asked the lady at the desk. That was the hardest thing I ever did in my life, and I been inside a blast furnace. And she took me in the back to Mrs. Spratley, and Mrs. Spratley asked me what I wanted to learn first. And I said the names. My wife. My son." He nodded at the book in my mother's arms. "And the cat. And she laughed at me, but nice. She said all right, Mr. Dombek, we'll start with the cat."
He wiped his face with the back of his hand.
"He followed me up there," he said. "Every Thursday. Sat on the steps out front in the cold for two hours. The librarian started letting him in the vestibule. Mrs. Spratley calls him my study partner. She calls him Mr. Boog. And then I'd come home and practice down the cellar, out loud, so I wouldn't lose it, and he'd come down with me, and I'd lay the book out on the workbench, and—" He started to laugh then, and it was a terrible laugh, and a good one too, both at once, wet and cracked. "He sat on it. Every time. You know that. But Jo-Jo, listen. Listen, Ro. He didn't sit on just anywhere on it. He'd walk across the page and he'd sit on the word I was stuck on. Every time. Every single time. The word I couldn't get. I'd be sitting there going buh, buh, buh, and he'd walk out and plant his big rear end right on top of it, like he was saying, that one, dummy. That's the one. Do that one again. And I'd lift him off and I'd do it again. Over and over, every night. Six weeks." He looked at Boog in my arms. "Swear to God. Like he knew."
Boog yawned, enormously, showing every one of his teeth.
"Why'd you stop?" I said. It was the first thing I'd said. "Mrs. Spratley said you missed. Last Thursday. Why didn't you go?"
My father looked at me, and then at the book.