"I'm not writing up a seventy-eight-year-old man for bread."
"I didn't ask you to." She made a mark on the clipboard. "I asked you to be visible. Walk the square. Make the contacts. Document. If someone's on a bench at six in the morning with a blanket, that's after-hours, that's a warning, that's how it works, and you know how it works because you've been doing it longer than I have. All right?"
"All right."
She held his eye a second longer than she needed to. Lloyd had known her for eleven years, since she had been a patrol officer in the Fourth and he had been her field training officer for a month while her assigned FTO was out with a herniated disc. He had taught her how to stand at a car window so that the driver had to turn his head to see you. He had taught her how to write a narrative a defense attorney could not take apart. She had learned everything faster than he had, and she was a sergeant now and he was a Park Ambassador, and neither of them had ever mentioned it, which was its own kind of courtesy.
"The rest of you," she said, "Founders Plaza has a farmers' market today until two, so don't be weird about the farmers."
Afterward, in the lot behind the station, Lloyd sat in his car with the engine running and the heater on and took out his phone. The last message in the thread with his son was from him, sent on Sunday: Saw the Browns lost again. Your grandfather would have had something to say. The message before that was also from him: Hope the new job is going ok. Before that, from Andy, three weeks old: thanks dad. And before that a long gap, and before that, eight months back, a photograph Andy had sent of a blue plastic medallion in the palm of his hand with the number 1 stamped on it in silver and the words ONE YEAR around the rim, and under it, I didn't want to make a thing of it but I wanted you to know.
Lloyd had looked at that photograph for a long time the night it came, sitting on the edge of his bed in his undershirt. He had typed several replies and deleted them. In the end he had written Proud of you son and then, because that seemed so small, That's huge, and then, because that seemed worse, nothing more. He had not known how to say the rest of it. He did not, even now, know exactly what the rest of it was. Something about the two years before the medallion, about the night he had driven to the house in Columbus where Andy was staying and stood on the porch knocking and heard nothing and kicked the door in like it was a call and found his son on the bathroom floor gray as a sidewalk, and about the Narcan in his own duty bag, and about the paramedics, and about how afterward, in the hospital, when Andy woke up, the first thing Lloyd had said was not I love you or thank God but Do you have any idea what you put your mother through. He had said it in his father's voice. He had heard himself say it in his father's voice, and he had not been able to stop.
He put the phone face down on the passenger seat. He typed nothing. He drove to Tollis Square.
The square was four acres of city block bounded by Front Street, Mercer, Holloway, and the old courthouse, which was now a museum of local history that nobody visited except fourth graders on field trips. It had been laid out in 1871 with a fountain in the middle and diagonal paths running from each corner, and the fountain was still there, a three-tiered iron thing painted green with a bronze heron on top that had lost one leg in some long-ago act of vandalism and been repaired so badly that it looked as if it were trying to hop. The fountain was off for the season. Leaves had collected in its lowest basin, red and yellow and brown, and the wind moved them around in slow circles.
There were thirty-one benches in Tollis Square. Lloyd knew because the DID had counted them in July as part of a proposal to replace them. The old benches were long wooden slats on cast-iron frames, the kind a person could lie down on, and the new ones, which had been ordered and paid for and were apparently stuck on a truck somewhere in Indiana, were steel with three armrests each, spaced so that nobody could stretch out.
Lloyd parked on Mercer and walked in from the northeast corner. It was a quarter past eight. The light was low and gold and came through the oaks in long bars, and the paths were wet from a rain that had ended before dawn. He walked his loop: past the bandstand where the Lutheran church did a soup lunch on Thursdays, past the war memorial with its granite names, past the little brick public restroom that was closed for repairs and had been closed for repairs since spring. Cornelius was already at his table near the fountain, setting up his chessboard, a seventy-eight-year-old retired machinist in a tweed cap who had played every morning in the square for as long as Lloyd had been on the force and probably longer, and who would play anyone, and beat almost everyone, and talk the whole time about the 1972 world championship as if it had happened last week.
"Officer," Cornelius said. "You look terrible."