"Okay," said Ossie, and for once in his life it did not mean what it usually meant. It did not mean, I will get through this. It meant yes.
The sign went into the garage that afternoon. Ossie carried it himself. He leaned it against the back wall behind Pista's old workbench, face to the wall, and stood there a minute looking at it, and then went out and closed the door.
The Ferkos were still going to Houston.
That was the part that didn't change. Sandor Ferko left on the twenty-eighth of September, in a borrowed pickup with a cooler of Ilona's stuffed cabbage on the seat beside him, and the plan was still that the family would follow when he found a place, maybe by Thanksgiving, maybe by Christmas. Zoli told Ossie about it on the bench, plainly, without kicking anything.
"But he said something," Zoli said. "Before he left. He said, maybe it's not forever. He said maybe if it goes good down there, in a couple years, he comes back with some money and opens up a shop, like a garage, here. With my uncle. He said a man ought to come back to where people clap for you." Zoli shrugged, the big shrug, but it was a different shrug now, looser. "He's never said anything like that. He's not a coming-back kind of guy. He's a never-look-back kind of guy."
"Maybe he changed," said Ossie.
"Maybe." Zoli looked down the street. "And he said I could finish the route till we go. And he said—" He stopped, and grinned, a little embarrassed. "He said if I wanted, when we go, I could come back summers. Stay with my uncle on Bakewell. Work at the garage. Sit on the bench." He shook his head. "He said, somebody's gotta, right? Like it was his idea."
He took his pocketknife out of his jeans, the same one, his father's old knife with the yellowed handle, and opened it, and Ossie thought for a second he was going to carve something new into the top slat beside ZF + nobody. Maybe scratch out nobody. Maybe put something else.
But Zoli just looked at the old carving for a long time and then closed the knife and put it back in his pocket.
"Leave it," he said. "It was true. Back then. It's okay that it was true."