The first afternoon in the house, while his mother was on the phone with the doctor's office, Aunt Yolie had disappeared.
It took them twenty minutes to notice. Teri came out of the kitchen and the front room was empty and the front door was open, and the panic that went over her face was the worst thing Ossie had seen since the day his father put his suitcases in the trunk of a Buick and drove to Arizona. They ran out onto the porch. Teri ran one way down Consaul, calling, and told Ossie to run the other, and he ran toward Front Street, his sneakers slapping, and when he got to the corner there was Aunt Yolie, sitting on the green bench in her hat, with her handbag on her knees, as calm as a church.
And standing a little way off, holding a bicycle, was a big black-haired boy in a sleeveless jean jacket, who looked at Ossie running up red-faced and out of breath, and then turned and rode away without a word.
Ossie did not think about the boy much that day. He sat down beside Aunt Yolie because he did not know what else to do. She looked at him with polite curiosity, as if he were a stranger on a train.
"You are waiting for the bus also?" she said.
"I guess so," said Ossie.
"I am waiting for my husband. He comes on the four o'clock." She looked at him more closely. "You have a face like somebody. Like Erzsi's girl. Little Teréz."
"That's my mom."
"No," said Aunt Yolie, and laughed. "Teréz is a little girl. She is so high." She held her hand a little above the bench. Then the bus came, and Pista was not on it, and she said, "He is working late," and stood up, and Ossie walked her home, and Teri came running back from the other end of the block and stood in the front yard and cried with her hand over her mouth, not loud, while Aunt Yolie went inside and began to take pots out of the cupboard for a supper for a man who had been dead six years.
That night, Ossie lay on a cot in the little back room that smelled of mothballs and lavender and listened to his mother on the telephone in the kitchen, talking to somebody at Saint Agatha's, saying words like sundowning and elopement risk. He knew what elopement meant at a nursing home. It did not mean what it meant in movies. It meant walking out the door and not knowing where you were.
In the morning, he asked Mrs. Bocskay about the bench.