All the DID parks. Tollis, Riverfront, Founders.
And the man had been quiet for a moment, and then he had said — Lloyd could hear it now, the voice, soft and a little hoarse from the cold — Is there any way around that? It's just that I meet my daughter here. Saturdays. Ten o'clock. Her mother drops her at the corner. It's the only — she's a little scholar, my girl. We trade books. This is our bench.
And Lloyd — Lloyd had not looked up from the form. He remembered that too. He remembered not looking up. He had said, There's an appeal on the back. And then, tearing the goldenrod copy off the pad, he had said: Don't bother, though. They never win.
The man had taken the copy. He had looked at the back for a long time, and then he had asked if he could borrow a pen.
Lloyd had given him one. A cheap black-barreled ballpoint with FALLON POLICE DEPARTMENT stamped on it in silver, from the box of five hundred the department had bought for community events. Lloyd had stood there with the radio murmuring on his shoulder and the sky going from black to gray over the courthouse while the man sat on the frosted bench with the warning on his knee and wrote, and wrote, very slowly, in capital letters, and Lloyd had said, after a while, You know it's got to be postmarked within ten days, and the man had said, without looking up, It's not an appeal. And Lloyd had said, Well, whatever it is, I need you out of the park, sir, and the man had finished, and capped the pen, and held it out to him, and Lloyd had said, Keep it, and walked away to his next contact, and had not thought about Arturo Mercado again for one year, until this minute.
"He kept the pen," Lucia said.
Lloyd looked at her.
She had been watching his face the whole time he was reading. He understood now that this was why she had wanted to finish the book first — not to make him wait, but to be ready, to have the last thing done before she had to watch someone read this. She reached into the front pocket of the backpack again and took out a ballpoint pen with a black barrel. The silver letters were mostly worn off. You could still make out FALL and DEPART.
"They gave it back to us with his things," she said. "In a bag. From the medical examiner. There was the blanket, and his glasses, and his wallet with nothing in it but his old library ID from Hamilton Middle School and a picture of me in second grade. And four library books. And this." She turned the pen in her fingers. "I use it to write about the books. I have a notebook. Twelve pages, one for each. So I could tell him."
"Medical examiner," Lloyd said. His voice sounded strange to him, like someone else's coming through a wall.
"He died in February," said Lucia Mercado. "February third. There was the cold snap, the one where it was nine below for four days and they opened the convention center as a warming shelter. He wasn't at the convention center. They found him on the riverbank under the Kessick Street bridge. The report said hypothermia and it said there were contributing substances." She said contributing substances the way someone says a phrase in a foreign language they have practiced, carefully, getting the stress right. "I know what that means. My mom told me. I asked her to tell me everything and she did."
Lloyd sat down.