He did not decide to. His knees — both of them, the bad one and the good one — simply stopped holding him, and the bench was there, and he sat on the end of it, as far from her as the bench would allow, with the goldenrod paper in both of his hands and his duty belt digging into his hip and the radio on his shoulder saying something about a disabled vehicle on Fifth that he did not hear.
The leaves moved in the dry basin of the fountain. Across the square Cornelius was playing chess with a man in a business suit and talking with his hands. A woman in a red coat walked by on the west path and glanced at the police officer and the girl on the bench and kept walking, and Lloyd thought, with the part of his mind that was always a cop, that she had seen what anyone would see — a cop questioning a kid — and that she had been glad it was not her business.
"I'm sorry," he said. It came out wrong. Too fast, too flat. It sounded like the way you say it at a door when you are notifying, the way they teach you: I'm sorry to have to tell you. He tried again. "I'm — Lucia, I'm very sorry about your father."
"Thank you," she said, the way a person says it who has heard it many times and has learned that it is easier for everyone to just say thank you.
"I didn't know."
"I know you didn't. How would you know?" She was not being sarcastic. She seemed genuinely to be asking. "You write a lot of these. I've watched you. I come here on Saturdays sometimes. Not every Saturday. I sit over there—" she pointed with her chin toward a bench across the path, nearer the war memorial "—and I read, and I watched you, and I saw your name tag. Vartanian. It's the same as the signature. I looked it up to make sure, how to spell it, on the city website, where they list the officers who get commendations. You got one in 2014. For a water rescue."
The Kessick, in April, a minivan, a woman and a toddler. He had gone in to his chest with the current tearing at him and gotten the window open with his baton. He had not thought about it in years.
"I didn't come here to yell at you," she said. "I want you to know that. My mom thought maybe I was going to yell at you. I thought about it. But I don't think you killed him. I've thought about it a lot and I don't think that. I know he could have gone to the convention center. I know he didn't like the mission because there were people there who stole his books. I know about the pills he took after he hurt his back, and then the other stuff after the pills got too expensive, and I know he lost his job at Hamilton because of it and that's why my mom made him move out when I was nine. I'm not stupid about it." She looked down at the Odyssey on her knees. "I just thought you should see the back. Because you only ever had the front."
Lloyd looked at the back of the paper. He looked at the eight paragraphs of gray print under the blue capitals, the appeal procedure that he had told the man not to bother with. Requests for review must be submitted in writing to the Office of the City Attorney, Park Exclusion Review, within ten (10) calendar days of issuance. He had never read it all the way through himself. He read it now, the parts he could see between the letters of A WRINKLE IN TIME and A CHRISTMAS CAROL. The subject may request that the exclusion be modified to permit access for specified lawful purposes, including but not limited to employment, religious observance, medical appointments, or court-ordered or family visitation.
Family visitation.
He read it twice to make sure. Then he put his free hand over his eyes and held it there, the heel of his palm pressed into one eye socket and his fingers into the other, the way his father used to at the end of a day at the shop, and he sat like that while a bus went by on Holloway and the wind shook a few more leaves loose from the oak overhead and one of them landed on the toe of his boot.
"Did he see you?" he asked, without taking his hand away. "After. Did he still get to see you?"