And between them, each boy taking an elbow, they walked her home.
After that, it was the two of them.
It did not happen all at once, and it did not happen the way it happens in movies, with a handshake and a montage and a song by Bryan Adams. Zoli did not stop being Zoli. He still rode around with Lenny and Spud in the mornings and told little kids to get their Big Wheels out of the street. He still spat in gutters. When Ossie said something dumb, like asking whether the Mud Hens were a real team, Zoli looked at him with deep and patient disgust and said, "Are you serious right now," and Ossie learned not to ask things like that. But every afternoon at ten to four, Zoli's bike was leaning on the bus sign, and the two boys sat on the bench with Aunt Yolie between them, and every afternoon they walked her home.
On the fourth day of this, Ossie asked about the carving.
They were early. Aunt Yolie had not come out yet. Ossie ran his thumb along the letters on the top slat, ZF + nobody, cut deep and dark into the wood, the edges worn soft by years of people's backs.
"That's you," he said. "ZF."
Zoli looked at the carving and then at the street.
"I was like seven," he said.
Ossie waited. He had learned that you could wait with Zoli the way you waited for the bus. If you didn't push, things came.
"My mom was working at the Hungarian Club kitchen back then," Zoli said. "Nights, banquets, weddings, whatever. And my dad was doing doubles at the coke plant, 'cause there was overtime, before it all went to crap. And I'd get off the school bus at this corner, and there was nobody home, and I wasn't supposed to have a key 'cause I lost the last one. So I was supposed to wait here till my mom came home on the bus at five. Every day. I was seven, I didn't know. I thought everybody else had somebody and I had the bench." He snorted. "So I carved that. Took me like a week, with my dad's knife. ZF plus nobody. I thought it was real deep."
"It kind of is," Ossie said.