The results never came.
By the end of September my mother was calling the community college from the phone on the kitchen wall every few days. The phone was harvest gold with a cord so long and stretched you could take it all the way into the dining room, and she'd stand there twisting the cord around her finger, saying "Dombek, D-O-M-B-E-K, Tadeusz, T-A-D," and being put on hold, and being transferred, and being told that the results went out in batches and she should be patient. My father would leave the room when she did it. He'd go down to the basement, or out on the steps, or up to the bathroom, and Boog would go with him.
In the first week of October he started going out on Thursday nights.
He said he was going down to the union hall, where some of the guys got together on Thursdays to talk about jobs and play cards. He'd leave at a quarter to seven, after supper, in his tan coat, and come back a little after nine. That was all. It didn't seem like anything. Lots of the laid-off men had somewhere they went. Mr. Florkowski, who'd been laid off from the Point the same week as my father and now drove a Yellow Cab nights, said half of them went to the bar at Kelly's on Dundalk Avenue and called it the union hall, and my mother said not her husband, and Mr. Florkowski said of course not, hon, of course not.
But my father didn't come home smelling like beer. I would have known; Boog would have known, too, because Boog hated the smell of beer and would leave the room when my uncle Eddie came over, my mother's brother, who smelled like it all the time. When my father came home on Thursdays, Boog met him at the door and wound around his legs and then followed him straight down to the basement, and the two of them stayed down there till eleven, twelve o'clock at night. If I crept to the top of the basement stairs and listened I could hear my father's voice, low, steady, saying something over and over that I couldn't make out, and every once in a while a sharp sound, like he'd slapped the workbench, and then quiet, and then the voice again.
"What's he doing down there?" I asked my mother.
"Fixing something," she said. "Your father's always fixing something."
On the second Thursday in October, Mrs. Florkowski stopped me on the steps when I was coming home from Holy Rosary. She was out with her bucket and her brush, doing her marble on a Thursday, which she only did if somebody important had died or was coming to visit. She was a short wide woman with a hairnet and enormous arms, and she talked to everybody on Decker Avenue like they were her personal responsibility.
"Joey, hon," she said, "you know your cat's going all the way up to Eastern Avenue?"
I said I didn't know that.