"Yes, ma'am."
"Lu, did he—" She turned back to her daughter. "Did he bother you? Did he—"
"He called me Little Scholar," Lucia said. "He didn't know. And then I gave it to him." She held up the Odyssey, the plastic sleeve visible inside the front cover. "And then he sat here while I finished. That's all. He was quiet."
Lorena Mercado looked at the book, and at the sleeve, and at Lloyd, and he saw her decide not to cry in front of him, and then he saw her decide it did not matter, and the tears came up into her eyes and stayed there, not falling, which was somehow worse.
"Did you finish?" she asked her daughter.
"I finished."
"How was it?"
"He gets home."
"Okay." Lorena took a breath. "Okay. Good. That's good, baby." She looked at Lloyd. "Do you have any idea," she began, and then stopped, and he understood that she had not decided how the sentence ended. He waited for it anyway. He had been waiting for it, he realized, since he turned the paper over; he had been waiting for someone to finish that sentence at him, the way he had once started it at his own son in a hospital room.
"No," he said, when she did not go on. "I don't. I'm not going to pretend I do."
"He was on that bench because it was the only place in this city he thought of as his," she said. "Do you understand that? Not the mission. Not the camp. That bench. Because of her. He slept here because when he woke up it would be Saturday, or closer to Saturday." Her voice was low and very even, the voice, he guessed, that she used in the ICU at four in the morning. "And you took it. In five minutes, with a form."
"Yes, ma'am."