A silence again, with Lyman's alarm clock ticking placidly on the table between them.
It had come, the moment to bring the boy around; Frank had waited for it in the weeks since he had known the story. In this silence he mapped out his argument, as he would have prepared a brief.
"How much has your father ever helped you, Jimmie?"
"Not much. We've always been poor, you know."
"Because he drank?"
"Yes, he never could keep a job but so long."
"Not even when you were small?"
"I wasn't with him then. When my mother got—when she left him, she took me with her. Then she died, and I was with my grandmother awhile, then I lived with him until I came here."
"Are you very fond of him?"
"No, Frank, I'm not; not a bit. He never did anything for my mother or for me, to make me."