Lucia Mercado looked at him for what felt like a long time. He made himself be looked at. He did not look away, and he did not arrange his face, and he understood that he had no idea what she saw — a fat old cop with a bad knee and a gray mustache and his reading glasses in his shirt pocket, the man who had written the front of the paper — and that whatever it was, he had earned it.
"Okay," she said. "You can stay. But you have to give that back first."
He looked down. He was still holding the warning in both hands. He held it out to her, and she took it and slid it carefully back into its plastic sleeve and put the sleeve inside the front cover of the Odyssey, and opened the book at the owl bookmark, and began to read.
He sat.
He sat on the end of the bench with his hands on his knees and his eyes on the gravel in front of him and he did not look at her. He heard the pages turn, not often; she was a slow reader now, slower than she had been when he walked up, and he understood that she was reading the end of the Odyssey the way you read something you can only read once for the first time. Somewhere in the middle of it she sniffed, and then sniffed again, and he took the small packet of tissues out of his left breast pocket, the one he carried for notifications, and set it on the bench between them without looking, and after a minute it was gone.
He thought about the numbers. He could not help it. Four this week. Before that, during the summer sweep, eleven, and during the spring one, nine, and he had written them in the ordinary course of things all year, one here and two there, a man asleep on the bandstand steps, a couple in a tent behind the war memorial, Lavonne. Maybe sixty, last year. Maybe more. Each of them with a goldenrod copy and eight paragraphs of gray print on the back. He had never once wondered what any of them did with the paper afterward. He had assumed, insofar as he had assumed anything, that they threw it away. Lavonne had torn hers in four and handed it back to him. The rest had folded theirs up and put them in a pocket and walked out of the square, and they had become, in his mind, no longer people but a number on a clipboard, to be underlined twice in blue. And one of them had sat on this bench in the frost and written a year of books on the back with Lloyd's own pen, while Lloyd stood over him, impatient, thinking about his next contact.
He thought, I told him not to bother.
He thought about Andy. He thought about Andy on the bathroom floor, and about the Narcan, and about the first thing he had said in the hospital. He thought about the year before that, when Andy had been somewhere in Columbus and not answering, and about how Lloyd had lain awake at night imagining his son on a bench in some other city's park at six in the morning, under a blanket, with some other city's cop shining a flashlight in his face. He had imagined it so many times. He had imagined the cop being kind. He had prayed, he who did not pray, that the cop would be kind. And in the mornings he had gotten up and put on his uniform with the green DID patch on the shoulder and gone to Tollis Square and been whatever he had been.
The courthouse clock struck eleven. The sound came across the square in long iron notes, and Lucia turned the last page, and read to the bottom of it, and then sat with the book open on her knees and her hand flat on the page, not moving.
After a while she closed it. Softly, this time. The covers came together without a sound.
"He gets home," she said.
Lloyd waited.