In Livno a father is called ćaća, and Roko learned that word before he found out he did not have one. He found out in second grade, on the school playground, from Duje Barišić, who was a head taller than everyone and whose dad drove a truck to Germany. "Where's your dad, Roko?" Duje asked in front of everyone, the way you ask something when you already know the answer. Roko said his dad was in Austria, on a construction site, because he had heard that from some other kid about some other dad. Duje laughed. "Austria, my foot. My mom says you don't have a dad. That you never even had one."
By the end of the long break the whole school knew. The kids surrounded him by the basketball hoop and chanted no dad, no dad, like at a match. When the bell rang for the end of classes, Roko did not go home. He ran down the street, across the road, to the Bistrica, and sat on the stone wall by the old mills, where the water foams over the weir. He threw pebbles into the river and cried the way eight-year-old boys cry when they think nobody can see them: angrily, wiping his nose on his sleeve.
Mijo Galić saw him from the door of his workshop. Galić Auto Body stands right on the bank, in an old forge his grandfather built, and above the entrance still hangs a horseshoe as big as a plate. His grandfather was a blacksmith, his father a blacksmith, and Mijo worked the forge until he was twenty-five, when horses became rare, and the wild ones on Cincar had never needed shoes anyway. Then he switched to fenders, hoods and the doors of old Golfs. He was big, with hands like shovels and a voice he tried to keep low, because since his wife had died four years earlier he had had no reason to speak loudly in his house.
He went down to the wall, wiped his hands on his overalls and sat next to the boy, not too close. For a while they both looked at the water. "Who made you angry?" he asked. "Nobody." "That Nobody must be big if he makes you cry like that." Roko almost laughed, then remembered and started crying again. He told him everything in one breath: Duje, the playground, the Austria that did not exist. "They say I don't have a dad," he said. "Everybody has a dad," said Mijo. "Sometimes he just isn't around." "Mine never was." Mijo had nothing to say to that. So he said it was late, that his mom would be worried and that he would walk him home.
Roko lived with his mother at the end of a street below Gorica, in a small house with a blue gate and a Golf whose front door had been dented since last winter. Višnja worked shifts at the cheese dairy, and in the afternoons she cleaned offices at the town hall. In Livno she was known as a woman who never lingered anywhere: not in the shop, not after Mass, not at the gate when someone called to her. She had been twenty-one when she gave birth, and the town had never forgotten it, though nobody knew anything for certain except that the father was from Split and had worked one summer at Buško Lake.
She opened the door before they knocked. She saw her son with red eyes and a big man in overalls behind him, went pale, then turned red. Mijo took off his cap and held it in both hands as if it were to blame for something. He said the boy had been down by the mills, that he was fine, that the kids had teased him a little. Višnja said a brief thank you and hugged her son, and Mijo was already turning to leave when Roko pulled at his sleeve. "Will you be my dad?"
A silence fell in which they could hear the bell at Gorica ringing for evening Mass. "Roko," Višnja said sharply, the way you speak to a child who has touched a hot stove. Mijo looked at the boy, then at her, then at the dented door of the Golf. "I will," he said. Then, because it seemed to him he had been too quick, he added: "If your mom allows it. And if you come help me in the workshop on Saturdays, because I need somebody who knows how to hold a hammer." Višnja said nothing. She closed the door quietly, and Mijo talked to himself the whole way back to the Bistrica.
The next day Roko walked into school as if he had grown overnight. At the first break he planted himself in front of Duje and said he had a dad. His name was Mijo Galić, he was a panel beater down by the mills, and he had a hammer bigger than Duje's head. Duje went to ask his mom, and at the second break he came back with a verdict: Mijo Galić had not married Roko's mother, and a dad who has not married your mom does not count. It's like a car without the paperwork, he said. The kids laughed. This time Roko did not cry. After classes he went straight to the workshop.
There were two other men in the workshop: old Mijat, who had worked with Mijo's father, and Dinko, a young man who painted cars and sang while he painted. When Roko, standing in the doorway, told them what Duje had said, Dinko stopped singing and Mijat set down his grinder. Mijo was standing over the hood of a Passat, tapping at a dent with a rubber mallet, slower and slower. "Without the paperwork," he repeated. "That's what he said," said Roko. Mijat wiped his hands on a rag and said, without looking at anyone: "She is a good woman, Mijo. She works two jobs, she gossips about nobody, and her child is well brought up. If I were your age, I would not wait for somebody who is eight to tell me." Dinko added that Višnja's Golf needed a new door, if that meant anything to him. Mijo looked at the hood for a long time. Then he took off his overalls.
That evening he knocked at the blue gate washed, shaved and in a shirt that had clearly spent a long time in the wardrobe. In his hands he held a wheel of Livno cheese, the best, from a farmer in Čaprazlije. Višnja looked at him, then at the cheese, and laughed, for the first time since he had known her. "Mijo, I work at the cheese dairy." He turned red to the ears and said he knew, but he had not known what else to bring, and he could not pick flowers. He came in. He sat on the edge of a chair as if he might stand up any moment. They talked about Roko, about school, about the Golf. When the boy had fallen asleep, Višnja told him about Split and Buško Lake too, briefly and without tears, and waited to see how he would look at her. He looked at her the same way.
He came on Wednesdays and Sundays. He straightened the Golf's door, then the gate, then the gutter. On Saturdays Roko sat in the workshop on a wooden crate, with welding goggles sliding down his nose, learning that you do not hit a dent, you coax it. On the street people were silent at first, then they whispered, and then one day Višnja's neighbor offered on her own to watch Roko when the two of them went into town for pizza. Višnja said they were not going for pizza. The neighbor said they should.
In June, at the gate, Mijo took something wrapped in newspaper out of his pocket. It was a small horseshoe, a real one, which he had forged the night before at his grandfather's fire, for the first time in twenty years. "I don't know how to talk nicely," he said. "I only know how to fix things. If you want, I would like to get married. To you, I mean. And to him." Višnja held the horseshoe for a long time, still warm from his pocket, and Mijo already thought he had ruined everything when she said yes, but that he should tell Roko himself, because the boy had asked first.
The next day, at the first break, Roko planted himself in front of Duje again. He said that in September Mijo Galić was marrying his mother, that he would have the paperwork like any dad, and that Mijo had said he would straighten the ears of anyone who bothered him like a fender, with a rubber mallet, slowly, so the paint would not crack. Duje was silent for a long time. The kids waited. Then Duje said, more quietly than usual, that last week his dad had clipped a dumpster in the parking lot by the department store and his bumper was all dented. He asked how much that would cost. Roko looked him up and down, the way Mijat sizes up a car that has been hauled in after a crash. "For you," he said, "double."