My father didn't answer. He looked down at the ticket in his hand for a long time, and then he looked at the workbook in his lap, crumpled now, the cover torn from where they'd crushed it between them. He smoothed the cover flat on his knee with his palm, slowly, the way he'd dried his hands between each finger at the sink.
"I don't know, Ro," he said. "I don't know if I can do it."
"I know you don't," my mother said. "That's all right. I didn't ask you to know."
He put the Greyhound ticket back inside the book. Not in his pocket. In the book, folded, at the page where he'd stopped, the way you'd keep your place.
Then he opened the workbook on his knee to the page after it, a page I could see over his shoulder, with a drawing of a man at a kitchen table and short black sentences underneath. He put his finger under the first word. He didn't say anything about it. He just started, slowly, out loud, in the cold, on the steps of our house on Decker Avenue at ten-thirty at night, with my mother on one side of him and me behind him and the suitcase at our feet, and somewhere downtown at the Greyhound station on Fayette Street the 10:40 to Norfolk was going to pull out without him, and the 7:15 was still nine hours off, and whether he would be on that one, or the one after it, or none of them, I didn't know yet. Nobody did.
He got four words in before Boog came down off the suitcase, climbed up into his lap, walked out onto the open page, and lay down. Square in the middle, paws tucked, looking up at him.
My father looked at the cat. Then he lifted one of Boog's big orange paws, very gently, two fingers under it, and looked at the word underneath.
"Yeah, okay," he said quietly. "That one."
And he sounded it out, and got it wrong, and tried it again.