Rosado said, "Ms. Reddick, before you sit down. Mr. Mahoney's remark about Mr. Dwyer's father. Do you have a view on that?"
Antoinette was quiet a moment. Neal watched her. She did not look at him.
"Madam Chair," she said, "I've met a lot of men inside who were the sons of somebody. Somebody with a name, somebody with a fist, somebody with a needle in his arm. What the father taught the son is real. I've never seen it be the whole story. I've seen it be where the story starts." She tucked the envelope under her arm. "I'll leave the father to the father."
She walked back up the aisle. She sat down at the end of the row, two seats from Neal, and folded her hands in her lap, and closed her eyes again.
"Sergeant Dwyer," said Rosado.
He stood. His knee, the bad one, the left, had stiffened in the chair, and he felt it catch as he came up, and he walked to the podium in his polished shoes and stood behind it and took the three pages out of his inside pocket and unfolded them and laid them flat.
He looked at the first line. Members of the Board, my name is Neal Dwyer, and I have served the City of Brockton as a police officer for thirty-four years. He had written it in April. He had rewritten it in June. He had read it to the refrigerator at five-thirty that morning. He saw, reading it now, that it was the same sentence he had said in the lobby with the badge in his hand, with all the same parts in the same order: the name, the rank, the city, the years. It was a man putting his weight on a lever.
He folded the pages back up and put them in his pocket.
"Madam Chair," he said, "I had something written. I'm going to say something else, if that's all right."