"Don't call me ma'am."
"Mrs. Mercado."
"I'm not his wife. We never — it doesn't matter." She wiped her eyes with the back of her wrist, hard, and the anger in her face shifted, folded in on itself, became something else. "And it wasn't just you. I want you to know that too, because I can see you sitting there taking all of it, and I'm not going to let you have all of it. I'm the one who told him he couldn't come to the apartment. I'm the one who changed the locks after he took my mother's ring to a pawn shop on Seventh. I had reasons. They were good reasons. I'd make the same decision again." She looked at her daughter. "Mostly."
"Mama," said Lucia.
"He wrote me a letter in January," Lorena said, "asking if when the year was up he could have Saturdays at our place, supervised, with me there. Two hours. He said he'd be in a room on Linden Street by then. He said he'd be ninety days clean and he'd bring me the paper from the clinic to prove it. And I put it on the refrigerator under a magnet and I didn't answer it, because I wanted to see if he'd really get to ninety days. I wanted proof. And it was still on the refrigerator when they came to tell us." She laughed, a terrible small sound. "So you want to sit on that bench and feel like you did it. Get in line, Officer Vartanian. There's a line."
The wind came across the square and moved the leaves in the fountain. Lloyd stood in it.
"Can I ask you something?" Lorena said. "And I want the truth. Not the — not the department thing."
"Yes."
"Why'd you write it? Why him? He wasn't hurting anybody. He was asleep."
Lloyd thought about the ordinance. He thought about posted hours, about complaints from the district, about the way you were trained to treat everyone the same so that nobody could say you hadn't. All of it was true, and none of it was what she had asked.
"Because it was sweep week," he said. "Because there was a number they wanted, and I was behind on it. Because he was on the bench at six-twelve and the sign says six. And because I didn't look up. He told me about her. He told me it was where he met his daughter, Saturdays at ten. He told me she was a little scholar. And I didn't look up from the pad. I told him there was an appeal on the back, and then I told him not to bother. And it turns out the appeal on the back has a line in it about family visitation that I didn't know was there, because in twenty-four years I never read it." He made himself keep looking at her. "That's why. That's the truth."
Lorena Mercado held his eyes for a long moment.