"Shut up." But he didn't sound mad. "Anyway. She used to come out. Néni. She was waiting for Pista, it was his bus too, the four o'clock, and he'd get off and she'd be all happy, and then she'd see me sitting here and she'd say, Zoltán, why are you sitting here like an orphan, come in the house. And she'd take me in and give me a kifli and milk and I'd do my homework at her kitchen table till my mom came. Pista would read the paper and do that thing with the quarter. Every day, almost, for like two years." He was looking hard at the river end of Front Street, where nothing was happening. "My mom tried to pay her once. She got so mad. She said, you do not pay for a child to sit in a kitchen, Ilona, what is wrong with you."
Ossie didn't say anything. He thought about Zoli at seven, small and alone on the bench with his dad's pocketknife, carving the word nobody into the wood with all his strength, and an old woman coming across the street in a hat to tell him he was wrong.
"So that's why," he said finally.
"That's why what."
"Why you do it. Walk her home."
Zoli shrugged again, the big careless shrug. "Somebody's gotta," he said, and then the screen door across the street opened, and Aunt Yolie came out in her hat.
Ossie found out about the rest of Zoli's life in pieces, the way you find out the shape of a room in the dark, by bumping into things.
He found out that Zoli's father, Sandor Ferko, had been laid off from the coke plant in 1983 when they shut down two of the batteries, and had not had steady work since. That he did odd jobs and drove a tow truck sometimes for a cousin, and that he had been on the phone a lot lately with a man in Houston who was hiring for pipeline work. That he was a big, loud, proud man who believed the worst thing a Ferko could be was soft. Ossie met him once, outside Lacko's, a man with Zoli's same black hair gone gray at the sides and hands like catcher's mitts, and Sandor Ferko had looked down at Ossie and then at his son and said, "This is the one? The Cleveland kid?" and Zoli had said, "Parma," before Ossie could, and his father had laughed a big laugh that had something sore underneath it.
He found out that Zoli had three little sisters, Ilonka and Kati and the baby, Rózsi, and that on days his mother worked a double, Zoli was the one who made them baloney sandwiches and broke up their fights and walked them to the pool at Collins Park. He found out that Zoli gave most of his Blade route money to his mother in an envelope on Fridays, without being asked, and that his mother cried about it sometimes when she thought he was asleep. He found out that Zoli had been told by his father, more than once, that he was the man of the house when Sandor was gone, and that men of the house didn't cry, didn't quit, didn't let anybody walk on them, and didn't let anybody take what was theirs.
"He means like the corner," Zoli said, one afternoon when they were walking back from the Kertesz house, after Aunt Yolie was settled in her chair with the radio. "Like, don't let the Navarre Park kids come over here and take the corner. That kind of stuff. Be tough." He kicked a pop can down the sidewalk. "So that's what I did, the first day. With you. I was being tough."
"You were pretty tough," Ossie said.