"Parma."
"That's Cleveland." Zoli spat neatly into the gutter, not at Ossie, just generally, as a kind of punctuation. "What are you doing on this bench?"
"Sitting."
Lenny laughed. Zoli did not. He looked up Front Street toward the bridge, where the four o'clock bus was not yet in sight, and then down at Ossie again, and something moved in his face that Ossie could not read.
"This is our corner," Zoli said. "You get that? Me and these guys. Since we were in diapers. You don't just come down from Cleveland and plant yourself on it like a mailbox. You don't belong here."
There it was. Ossie had been waiting for it, in a way, since the station wagon crossed the Maumee and his mother said, there it is, there's the old neighborhood, in the voice she used for funerals. He had been waiting for somebody to tell him what he already knew, that he was a visitor, that this was a place full of people who had known each other for three generations, who said words in Hungarian across the fences and went to the same church and the same bakery and the same bars, and that he would be gone by Labor Day anyway, back to Parma and the apartment and the sixth grade, and none of it would have mattered.
He thought about getting up. It would have been easy. His legs were already half thinking about it.
Then he looked at his watch, a Timex with a cracked face that had been his father's, and saw that it was three fifty-eight.
"No," Ossie said. He said it quietly, but he did not look at his book when he said it. "I'm staying."
Lenny stopped laughing. Spud said, "Oh, man," under his breath, the way kids say it when they think something is about to happen that they will tell about later.
Zoli got off his bike. He let it fall on its side in the grass between the sidewalk and the curb, and he took the two steps to the bench and stood over Ossie, close enough that Ossie could smell newsprint and Juicy Fruit and the sharp sweat of a boy who had been riding all afternoon in ninety-degree heat.