Zoli and Ossie sat on the flatbed with their backs against the cab and didn't look at each other, because if they had, they both would have lost it, and there were people watching.
It took Teri Belinsky nine more days to decide, and she did not tell Ossie she had decided until she was sure.
He knew something was happening. She was on the phone constantly, to Parma and to people in Toledo whose names he didn't know. She went downtown twice in her good blouse. She went next door and sat in Mrs. Bocskay's kitchen for two hours, and he could hear them through the window, sometimes talking low and sometimes laughing. She went to Saint Stephen's and talked to Father Gyula. She drove to a place on Starr Avenue called Lutheran Home of the Good Shepherd, which had a day program for old people with memory problems, three days a week, with a van that picked you up at your door. She came home from that one and stood in the kitchen with her purse still on her shoulder and looked at the realtor's sign, still leaning against the porch, for a long time.
On the Saturday before Labor Day, she sat Ossie down at the kitchen table, under the light, where she had read his map.
"Okay," she said. "Here's what I can do. And I want you to listen to all of it, because it's not what you want, exactly. It's what I can do."
Ossie listened.
She had a job, she said. Nights, at a nursing home on the east side, eleven to seven, four nights a week. The pay was a little less than Saint Agatha's but the rent was nothing, because the house was paid for. She had called the landlord in Parma and he was letting her out of the lease if she paid through October. She had talked to the school, the junior high on Paine Avenue, and Ossie could start on Tuesday. Aunt Yolie would go to the day program three days a week. Mrs. Bocskay would come over the mornings Teri was sleeping. Mr. Halasz would keep knocking twice. The bakery girl would keep writing it down. The old men from the club would keep checking the porch light.
"And four o'clock," Teri said, "is yours."
Ossie couldn't speak.
"It's a year," his mother said. "Do you hear me? It's a trial. One school year. I am not promising forever. I'm not promising it'll work. She's going to get worse, honey. She is. There's going to come a day when a bench and a map and a whole neighborhood of good people isn't going to be enough, and when that day comes, we're going to have to do the hard thing, and I need you to know that right now, so it doesn't break your heart later." She reached over and put her hand flat on the cover of his spiral notebook, which was lying on the table between them. "But it's not today. You showed me that. It's not today."