"Last night. After. When I came back from your house." Zoli was looking straight ahead at the Stroh's can. "He was waiting up in the kitchen. He saw the whole thing out the back door, me and néni and you. And he said, so this is what you've been doing. Every day. And I said yeah. And he said, how long. And I said a year. And he just looked at me." Zoli swallowed. "And then he told me about Houston. Like right then, at like two-thirty in the morning. And I said, I can't go. I said, somebody's gotta be on the bench at four o'clock. And I said, I'm staying."
Ossie felt the words go through him like a bell.
"What did he say?"
"He didn't yell. I thought he'd yell. He just said, you're fourteen. He said, Zoltán, you're fourteen years old, you can't stay anywhere, you go where your family goes, that's what being a family is. And I said, she's family. And he said, she's not, son. She's a neighbor. And I said—" Zoli stopped. His jaw was working. "I said, she was there when you weren't. When you were doing doubles and Mom was at the club and I was sitting on that bench by myself. She was there. And he didn't say anything after that. He just got up and went to bed."
They sat there in the last of the light. A train was going by down past the refinery, a long one, the cars clanking slow.
"It wasn't fair," Zoli said. "What I said. He was working. He was working for us. He wasn't out drinking or anything, he was working doubles at the coke plant so we could have stuff. It's not his fault I sat on the bench. It's not anybody's fault." He wiped his face with the back of his wrist, fast, like swatting a fly. "I just didn't want it to be nobody. You know? I didn't want her to be the one on the bench with nobody. Like I was."
"I know," said Ossie.
"So I guess you were right the first day," Zoli said. "When you came. I told you you didn't belong here. Turns out I'm the one who's leaving." He laughed again, that short laugh. "You and me both. You go back to Parma, I go to Texas, she goes to some place with music on Tuesdays. And the bench just sits there."
They didn't talk after that. They sat on the dead Pontiac until the streetlights came on, and then Zoli slid off the hood and said, "See you at four," and Ossie said, "Yeah," and they went home different ways.
The Birmingham Ethnic Festival was that Sunday, the last one in August, and Ossie had never seen anything like it.