She read it for a long time. Ossie stood in the doorway in his bare, dirty feet and waited.
When she looked up, her face had something in it he didn't recognize.
"Ossie," she said. "Honey. This is beautiful. This is really beautiful." She closed the notebook. "But it's not a plan. It's a bunch of good people doing what they can. And what they can do isn't enough anymore. Tonight proved it." She held the notebook against her chest. "I see this every day. I know where it goes. It doesn't get better. It only goes one way."
"Then let's stay," Ossie said. It came out of him before he could stop it. "Let's stay here. Both of us. You could get a job here. They have nursing homes in Toledo. You could work nights and I'd do days, and Zoli, and everybody. We could stay."
His mother looked at him as if he had started speaking Hungarian.
"Oszkár," she said, very gently, the first time she had ever called him that. "We have a lease. I have a job. You have school. I can't just — people don't just do that."
"Why not?"
She didn't answer. She sat at the kitchen table holding the notebook, and after a while she said, "Go to bed, honey," and he did, and he lay on the cot and listened to her sitting out there in the kitchen for a long time, not moving, not on the phone, just sitting.
Zoli wasn't on the bench the next afternoon.
Ossie sat there alone at ten to four, then five to four, with the library book on his knees. He kept looking down Front Street for the patched-up Schwinn. It didn't come. Aunt Yolie came out in her hat and sat down beside him and asked if it was late, and he said no, it was right on time, and the bus came and Pista was not on it, and Ossie walked her home by himself, one elbow, which felt wrong now, lopsided, like walking with one shoe.