My father knew the buses by color and number and by the shapes of the stops, not the names. He knew how to get to anywhere he'd been once, and nowhere he hadn't. He never did a crossword. He didn't read the Sun; he listened to the news on WBAL in the morning and watched Jerry Turner on Channel 13 at night, and he could tell you everything that was in the paper anyway, because he listened to the men at the mill argue about it. He didn't read the Orioles box scores. He listened to every game on the radio, Chuck Thompson and Jon Miller, and kept the whole season in his head, every batting average, so that when I read him a box score out of the paper he'd correct it before I finished. "Murray's at three-oh-four, not three-oh-two. They screwed that up." And he'd be right.
I'm telling you this so you understand it was all there. It was all right there, my whole life, like the picture on the screen. You just had to be on the inside looking out instead of the other way around.
The layoff came in April. That spring Bethlehem Steel was laying off men at Sparrows Point by the hundreds, the way they had been for a few years by then, a slice here and a slice there, like somebody cutting a roast. The tin mill was supposed to be safe because tin plate was for cans and people were always going to need cans. Then it wasn't safe. My father came home on a Thursday in the middle of the afternoon, in Mr. Florkowski's Impala, which was wrong, because they worked till three and it was barely one. Boog was asleep in the window behind the painted cottage and didn't even know to get up. My father came in and sat down at the kitchen table in his work clothes with his lunch bucket still full in front of him and said, "Well, Ro, that's it." My mother was home because it was her day off. She put down the iron. She came and stood behind him and put her arms around his neck and her chin on top of his head, and they stayed like that for a long time, and nobody said anything, and I stood in the doorway to the dining room in my school clothes and didn't know if I was supposed to be there.
Boog came in a while later and jumped up on the kitchen table and sat on the pink slip.
That's the first time I remember my father laughing about the paper thing. He lifted Boog up under the belly and held him in the air, all sixteen pounds hanging there with his back legs dangling, and said, "You want it? Take it. It's all yours, buddy." And then he put his face in Boog's fur and kept it there.
The summer was strange. There was unemployment, and the union had a little something, and my mother picked up extra shifts. My father did every job around the house that had been waiting for years. He re-pointed the brick on the back wall. He fixed the leak under the bathtub. He built new shelves in the basement and painted the cellar door. He went down to the union hall on Dundalk Avenue three, four times a week to see what was going on and came home with the same news, which was nothing. Men he knew were leaving. A crane man named Wally Kostick went to Houston to work in the oil fields and came back in a month because the oil fields were laying people off too. Two guys from the tin line went to work for a cousin in a mobile-home plant in North Carolina. One man my father had worked next to for eleven years shot himself in his garage in Edgemere, and my parents went to the funeral, and my mother cried in the car and my father didn't say a word all the way home.
In August, a letter came. It came in a big white envelope with a window, from the state of Maryland, and my father handed it to my mother without opening it, and she read it out loud at the kitchen table, and I listened from the living room floor where I was lying with Boog on my chest.
It was about retraining. The government had a program for laid-off steelworkers. They'd pay for you to go to Dundalk Community College and learn something new, something with a future in it. Heating and air conditioning, it said, or electronics, or computer operations, or auto body. They'd pay the tuition and the books, and you'd get a check while you went, and at the end you'd have a certificate and a trade that didn't depend on Bethlehem Steel or the price of Japanese tin.
"Ted," my mother said. She'd put down the letter. Her voice was different. "Ted, this is it. This is the thing. Heating and air. You know you'd be good at that. You fix everything anyway."
My father was standing at the sink. He had his back to her. He was running the faucet in a thin silver thread for Boog, who'd heard the water and come running and leapt up on the drainboard. My father stood there and watched the cat drink.