He put the phone face down on the arm of the chair and did not look at it again that night. He did not know, when he went to bed, whether there would be anything there in the morning. He found, lying in the dark, that he could stand not knowing. That was new.
On Friday the new benches came. He was not on duty, but he drove past Tollis Square on his way back from the pharmacy and saw them through the oaks, stacked in wooden crates near the bandstand under a blue tarp, and saw the stenciled shipping labels from the factory in Indiana, and saw a city crew in orange vests unloading the bolts and the brackets. He parked on Mercer and walked in and stood looking at the crates for a while. Through a gap in the slats he could see the edge of one of the new benches, gray powder-coated steel, and the curve of an armrest set in the middle where a person's hip would go.
Saturday came cold and clear. He was at Petro's on Mercer at nine-thirty, standing in line behind a man in running clothes and a woman with twin toddlers in a double stroller, and when he got to the counter he asked the old woman behind it for cinnamon twists, and she asked him how many, and he did not know. He stood there not knowing. She waited. Finally he said six, because six seemed like a number that did not assume anything, and she put them in a white paper bag and folded the top over twice, and he paid and walked the two blocks to the square with the bag in one hand and A Wrinkle in Time in the other.
He had finished the book on Thursday night. He had started over on Friday, slower, with a pencil, making small marks in the margins the way he had not done since a freshman English class at Fallon State thirty-two years ago, which he understood you were not supposed to do to a library book and did anyway, very lightly, so they could be erased. He had a notebook in his coat pocket. It had one page in it so far.
The old benches were still in the square. The crews would come Monday. The second bench from the Holloway corner on the west path was empty, and the morning frost had melted off it in the sun except for a thin white margin along the shaded edge of each slat, and he brushed that off with his sleeve and sat down at one end.
Ten o'clock. The courthouse clock struck it across the square in long iron notes.
Cornelius was at his chess table by the fountain, alone, setting up the pieces. Arnold had not arrived yet. Lavonne's cart was under the copper beech, and Lavonne was not with it; she had left it under a tarp with a note pinned to the top that said in black marker BACK AT 11 — I MEAN IT, and Lloyd, reading it from forty feet away, had felt something in his chest he did not have a word for. The leaves had mostly come down from the oaks now and lay thick and wet on the grass, and the light came straight through the bare branches in a way it had not on Wednesday, and everything in the square was very clear.
He did not know if she would come. She had not said she would. She had said, Tell them about the back, and he had told Lavonne, and he had a photocopy in his coat of the correct current mailing address for the Office of the City Attorney, Park Exclusion Review, that Ms. Huang had found for him after twenty minutes of searching and printed out and handed to him without comment, and on Monday he had a meeting with his captain that he did not know the outcome of, and his phone was in his pocket with a message on it from Andy that had come on Thursday morning and that he had read perhaps forty times. It said only: ok dad. thank you. what book. And he had answered, and Andy had answered, and that was as far as it had gotten, and it was further than it had gotten in two years.
He did not know if she would come. He did not think, really, that she would. There was no reason she should. Wednesday had been the fourteenth, and the fourteenth had been the end of the list, and the list had not been written for him.
He opened A Wrinkle in Time to the first page and took his pencil out of his coat pocket. He set the bag from Petro's on the bench beside him, on the slat where the frost had been.
At ten past ten he looked up, for no reason, toward the Holloway corner, and saw someone coming into the square — small, too far away yet to make out a face, a dark sweatshirt, something under one arm that might have been a book or might have been anything — and he did not stand up, and he did not wave, and he did not let himself decide anything about it. He only sat there on the old bench, with the book open across his knees, and waited to see who it was.