He kept going. He asked questions in the next few days, carefully, the way he'd learned to ask Zoli things, and he found out more. He found out that the mailman, Mr. Halasz, knocked twice instead of once at the Kertesz house and waited for her to answer, every day, and if she didn't he went next door to Mrs. Bocskay. He found out that the girl at the counter at the bakery on Front Street wrote down what Aunt Yolie bought, every time, on a little pad she kept by the register, so she'd know if she came in twice in one day for the same thing and could gently say, you already got your rolls, néni, they're in your bag, see? He found out that two of the old men who played cards at the Hungarian Club took turns, without ever having discussed it, walking past the Kertesz house after dark to make sure the porch light was on and the front door was shut.
Nobody had organized any of it. It had just grown up around her, the way grass grows up around a stone. When he showed the map to Zoli, on the bench, the older boy looked at it for a long time without saying anything, his finger moving from house to house.
"I didn't know about the bakery," he said finally. "Or Halasz."
"Nobody knows all of it," Ossie said. "That's the thing. Everybody just knows their part."
Zoli turned the page and looked at the blank one after it, and then back at the map.
"You should show your mom," he said.
Ossie had thought of that already. He had thought of it in the night, lying on the cot, and it had made his heart pound so hard he'd had to turn on his side. Because he knew what he would be asking, if he showed her. He would not just be asking for Aunt Yolie. He would be asking for himself.
He had not said it to anyone, not even in his own head, in actual words. But it had been growing in him since the morning on the hill above the river, maybe since the first afternoon on the bench. In Parma, he was the kid in the apartment over the dry cleaner's whose dad left. In Parma, he walked home from school by himself and let himself in and watched Gilligan's Island and waited for his mother to come home from a twelve-hour shift too tired to talk. In Parma, nobody needed him to be anywhere at four o'clock. Here, an old woman in a hat crossed the street every afternoon and her face lit up when she saw him, even if she didn't always know his name. Here, a boy who had told him he didn't belong now leaned his bike on the bus sign every day at ten to four. Here, there was a whole map of people, and he was on it.
He wanted to stay. Not just on the bench. Here.
He knew it was impossible. His mother had a job and a lease and a bed waiting in the memory wing at Saint Agatha's. He had school in Parma in three weeks. People didn't just move to a town because of a bench.