Mrs. Bocskay was a wide, bossy, kind woman with forearms like a baker's, and she was hanging her own wash, a whole line of it, when he came to the fence. She listened to him and nodded and kept pinning sheets.
"Every day," she said. "Four o'clock. Since about a year, a year and a half. Before that it was only now and then. Now it's every day. She gets her hat and her purse and goes and waits for Pista." She shook out a pillowcase with a snap. "Bless her heart. They were married forty-four years, you know. He used to get off right there at that corner and she'd be on that porch waving a dish towel like he came back from the war."
"Who walks her home?" Ossie said. "When nobody's here?"
Mrs. Bocskay looked at him over the clothesline for a moment. Then she went back to pinning.
"The neighborhood," she said. "Somebody's always around."
Ossie did not think that was a whole answer. But he was twelve and new, and he did not know yet how to ask the next question, so he only said thank you and went back inside, where his mother was sitting at the kitchen table with her head in her hands and a stack of unopened mail in front of her, gas bills and doctor bills and a letter from the county about the property taxes.
"She left the gas on," Teri said, without looking up. "Last night. On the stove. No flame, just the gas. I smelled it at five this morning. Ossie, if I hadn't been here..."
She didn't finish. She didn't have to.
So Ossie started going to the bench. It was not anything he decided in words. He just found himself, the next afternoon at a quarter to four, putting on his sneakers and taking his library book and crossing Consaul Street and sitting down in the corner of the bench nearest the sign, and when Aunt Yolie came out of the house in her hat at five to four he was already there, and she sat down beside him and said, "You are waiting for the bus also?" and he said, "Yes," and that was how it began.
He liked it, a little, which surprised him. He liked the quiet of it. Back in Parma he had been the kind of kid who disappeared in a classroom, who sat in the back and drew maps in the margins of his notebook, and since his father left he had felt more and more like a person who was only visiting his own life. The bench was different. On the bench he had a job. For eleven minutes every afternoon somebody needed him to be exactly where he was, and he knew exactly what to do. Wait. Watch for the bus. Say, he must be working late. Take her elbow. Walk her home.
He found out other things, too, sitting there. He found out that if you said yes to Aunt Yolie's world instead of no, she stayed calm, and if you said no, if you said, Aunt Yolie, Uncle Pista died, she looked at you with such terrible, fresh grief that you felt like you had killed him yourself. His mother had tried it once, the second night, gently, sitting on the edge of the bed. Ossie had heard it through the wall. He never wanted to hear it again.