She moved her handbag over, though there was nowhere for him to sit, and Sandor Ferko lowered himself onto the edge of the platform at her feet, with his big work boots hanging down over the place where the track had been, and sat there. He didn't say anything to his son. He just put one hand on Zoli's knee, and left it there, and looked down the track with the rest of them.
Teri came after a while. She came up onto the platform and stood beside the bench, behind Ossie, and put her hands on his shoulders. Ossie felt them shaking, and then, slowly, stop.
They waited like that, the five of them, for maybe ten minutes. Nobody tried to hurry anything. The sun went down behind the grain elevators across the river and the sky went orange, then pink, then the soft gray-violet that August evenings go in Ohio, and from back up Front Street they could hear the festival, the violins and the cimbalom and somebody laughing into a microphone. Father Gyula's voice came faintly over a loudspeaker, announcing that she had been found, she was fine, thank you all, thank you, and a cheer went up that sounded very far away.
Finally Aunt Yolie sighed.
"He is working late," she said. "Again. That man."
"They work him too hard," said Zoli.
"Yes." She looked down at Sandor Ferko sitting at her feet and smiled at him kindly, as one smiles at a stranger who has been good company on a train. Then she looked at Teri, and something flickered in her face, some old light, and went out again. "Teréz," she said. "You came. You came all the way."
"I came, Aunt Yolie," Teri said. Her voice cracked right down the middle.
"Good," said Aunt Yolie. "Good. Then we will all have supper."
They took her home in the tow truck. There wasn't room for all of them in the cab, so Teri and Aunt Yolie rode up front with Sandor, and the two boys rode in the back on the flatbed, holding on to the winch, which was certainly against the law. Sandor drove ten miles an hour the whole way. When they turned onto Consaul Street the festival people saw them coming and moved the sawhorses and stood aside, and as the tow truck crept up the middle of the street through the crowd, under the paper lanterns that had just come on, people began to clap. Old ladies in aprons. Men in the beer tent. Little girls in dancing costumes. Lacko, in his bloody apron. Mrs. Bocskay, crying openly. Father Gyula, still in his towel. They clapped the whole length of Consaul Street, and Aunt Yolie sat up very straight in the cab and waved at them through the window, a small gracious wave, like a queen, as if she had always known they would be there.