"Because she said I was ready," he said. "She said there's another test at the college. Saturday. This Saturday, the twenty-third. She called the college herself and got me on the list. She said, Mr. Dombek, you can do the first part, the reading part, I've seen you, you're ready. And I believed her for about a day. And then I didn't." He shrugged, helpless. "And then your mother answered the phone."
My mother opened the book again. She turned to the back, to the inside of the back cover, where the pencil was thickest. She looked at it, and then she held it out the window, through the open sash, past Boog's ears, to the hole in the screen.
"Read it," she said.
My father stared at her.
"Ro."
"You read it to me, Ted. Right now. Out loud. Whatever this is. I want to hear you."
"I can't do it with the whole street—"
"The whole street's been listening for ten minutes," my mother said. "Mrs. Florkowski's had her ear on her screen so long she's gonna have a waffle on her face. Read it."
My father took the book. He held it in both hands under the streetlight, close to his face, the way he'd held the menu at the Double-T, except now I knew why. I could see the back cover from where I was. It was covered edge to edge in pencil, big separate capital letters, crooked lines that sloped downhill to the right, words crossed out and written again, one word erased so hard there was a hole through the paper. At the top, in Mrs. Spratley's neat slanting ink, it said: Write why you came.