"That last part's wrong," he said hoarsely. "Mrs. Spratley says it don't make sense the way I wrote it. She says it should be I want to be a father who is not ashamed, or I wish my father was not ashamed, and I got to pick which one I mean. I couldn't decide." He looked at me. "I guess I mean both."
Nobody said anything. Up the block somebody's dog barked twice and quit. The Number 10 went by up on Eastern Avenue, I could hear it, the diesel grinding through its gears at the light, and I thought, that's not his bus, that one's going the wrong way, and then I thought, I don't know which way is the wrong way anymore.
My mother let go of my shoulder. She turned around and walked out of the front room. I heard the front door open. I heard her come down the marble steps in her soft black waitress shoes, and then she was out there on the sidewalk with him, in her black uniform with no coat on, in November, and she put both her arms around my father's neck and her face into his corduroy collar, and the book got crushed between them, and neither of them seemed to care.
I stood in the window holding Boog and watched them through the hole in the cottage.
That's what I remember most, I think. Not what they said, because I couldn't hear most of what they said; they were talking low, into each other's coats. What I remember is the picture. My grandfather's white cottage with the red roof and the two swans and the little bridge, and a long torn place right down the middle of it where Boog had come through, and through the torn place, my mother and father standing on Decker Avenue under the streetlight, holding on. The rest of the screen showed the painting. The tear showed the street. It was the only part of that window you could see straight through from either side.
After a while my mother turned her head and said something, and my father laughed, the real laugh this time, short, and wiped his eyes with the heel of his hand. Then my mother walked down the sidewalk, three doors down, to where the brown Samsonite was still standing upright by itself under the streetlight like it was waiting for a bus of its own. She picked it up. It was heavy. She carried it back with both hands, bumping it against her knees, and set it down at the bottom of our steps. Then she sat down on the second step, on the cold marble she'd scrubbed on Saturday, and patted the step beside her. My father sat down. After a minute I put Boog down and went out too, and sat on the top step behind them with my knees up against my father's back.
Boog came out through the open front door, stepped very carefully down the marble, and sat down on top of the suitcase.
"Of course he does," my mother said.
Mrs. Florkowski's door opened six inches and closed again. Mrs. Iannuzzi went back inside. The street got quiet the way a street gets quiet when people have decided to pretend they didn't see anything, which on Decker Avenue was the kindest thing anybody could do.