"What's it say you got to do?" he said.
"You go take a test. A placement test. Reading and math, just to see where you are, it says here. Then they put you in a program. September 14th. A Saturday. Nine a.m. at the college." She was smiling. I could hear it. "Ted, it's paid for. All of it."
"A test," my father said.
"Just to see where you are. It's not pass or fail, honey. It says right here."
He turned off the water. Boog shook his head and sprayed the window.
"Okay," my father said. "Sure. Okay."
And that was all. My mother circled the date on the Esskay calendar on the side of the refrigerator, September 14th, with the red pen she used for her work schedule, and wrote TED TEST in capital letters inside the circle. She talked about it all the time after that. She talked about it at dinner. She told Mrs. Florkowski about it over the railing between the steps. She told her sister on the phone. She told me, when we were alone, that she thought this was going to be the best thing that ever happened to us, that maybe the layoff was God's way of getting my father out of that mill before it killed him like it killed his father's lungs. She had never sounded so hopeful about anything. I can still hear it.
My father didn't talk about it at all. In the weeks before the test he got quieter and quieter. He'd go down to the basement after supper and stay there. He stopped going to the union hall. He'd sit on the marble steps in the evening with Boog in his lap and not say anything to anybody who went by. He'd whistle those three or four notes through his teeth, over and over, until my mother asked him to please, for the love of God, find a new song.
On Saturday, September 14th, he put on his good gray slacks and a clean shirt and his tan work coat and left at eight o'clock in the morning for the Number 4 bus out to Dundalk. Boog walked him to the corner, the first time in months, with his tail up like a question. My mother kissed him on the steps and said, "Go get 'em, Tadeusz," which she only called him when she was teasing, and he smiled at her, and went.
He came back at one-thirty. He said it went fine. He said they'd send the results in the mail. He said he was tired and went upstairs and lay down on top of the bedspread with his shoes on, which my mother would have killed anybody else for, and slept until dinner.