"Good. Pista hates when I am late. He says, Jolán, you will be late for your own funeral, and I say to him, that is one appointment I am happy to be late for." She laughed, a small dry laugh, and patted Ossie's knee. Then she looked up the street toward the bridge and her face went soft and expectant, the way a child's face goes at a window on Christmas Eve.
Zoli stood there holding his bike. He did not look at Ossie. He looked at the old woman, and for a moment Ossie thought he was going to say something to her, but he didn't. He swung his leg over the bike and said, "Let's go," to the others, and the three of them rode off down Consaul toward the tracks without looking back.
At four-oh-six the Front Street bus came up from the bridge and stopped at the leaning sign, and the doors folded open with a gasp. Two men got off with lunch buckets. One of them nodded to Aunt Yolie. Neither of them was Pista Kertesz, who had come home from the Sun Oil refinery on the Front Street streetcar, and then the Front Street bus, every weekday afternoon for thirty-one years, and who had died in the spring of 1979, six years before Ossie Belinsky ever sat on that bench.
Aunt Yolie watched the bus pull away. She sat a while longer. Then she sighed and stood and smoothed her dress.
"He is working late again," she said. "They work him too hard at that place. Come, Oszkár. We will make him paprikás and he will be sorry he was late."
"Okay," Ossie said, and put Lewis and Clark under his arm, and took her elbow, and walked her home.
They had come to Toledo on the last day of July, Ossie and his mother, in a 1977 Ford Country Squire with fake wood on the sides and a cardboard box of Ossie's comic books riding in the back seat beside a box of his mother's nursing textbooks. Teri Belinsky was an LPN at a nursing home in Parma, which was a fact that would matter later, and which she mentioned often that summer in a tired, flat way, as if it were something that had been done to her. I see this every single day, Oszkár. I know what this is. I know where it goes.
The phone call had come in June from a woman named Mrs. Bocskay, who lived next door to Aunt Yolie and who had found her in the backyard at two in the morning in her nightgown, hanging wash that was already dry. Mrs. Bocskay had found the number for Teri in a little address book by Aunt Yolie's telephone. Teri was the closest thing to family the old woman had. Yolie had been Teri's mother's aunt, the one who had come over from Hungary with her in 1947 with one suitcase between them, and when Teri was a little girl they used to drive out to Toledo for Christmas and eat walnut rolls in the front room, and Pista would do magic tricks with a quarter. Then Teri's mother died, and Teri got married and then unmarried, and the Christmas visits turned into Christmas cards, and the cards got shorter, and then it was 1985 and a stranger was on the phone saying, I think somebody should come.
So they came. Teri took her two weeks of vacation and then two weeks unpaid, and she brought Ossie because there was nobody to leave him with. The plan, which she explained to him on the Ohio Turnpike with the radio playing Tears for Fears, was simple. They would clean the house. They would find out what the doctors said. They would get Aunt Yolie's papers in order. And by Labor Day they would put the house on Consaul Street up for sale and bring Aunt Yolie back to Parma, to Saint Agatha's, the home where Teri worked, where she could keep an eye on her and where there was a bed coming open in the memory wing.
"It's the best thing," Teri said. "It's the only thing. She can't be alone anymore, honey. And I can't be in two cities."
Ossie had said okay. He said okay to most things. It was a way of getting through them.