"After Labor Day."
"And taking her where?"
"Parma," Ossie said. "There's a place. My mom works there. It's a good place." He heard how it sounded and felt his face get hot. "It is. They have a garden. They do music on Tuesdays."
Zoli was quiet for a long time. A dog barked two yards over. Somewhere down toward Front Street a radio was playing the Tigers game and somebody groaned at something.
"She doesn't know anybody in Parma," Zoli said finally.
"She doesn't know anybody here either. She doesn't even know me. She thinks my mom is five."
"That's not the same thing." Zoli's voice went hard and fast. "You think she doesn't know anybody? She knows Mrs. Bocskay. She knows Lacko, she goes in there every Saturday and buys one pork chop and he gives her two and charges her for one and she thinks he's bad at math. She knows Father Gyula. She knows the bench. She knows that bus. She knows which step on her porch is loose. You take her to Parma, she's gonna wake up in some room that smells like Lysol and she's gonna go looking for that bench, and it's not gonna be there, and then what?" He stopped. He looked away. "Then what," he said again, quieter.
Ossie put down the trash bag.
"You walk her home," he said. It was not a question. He had been thinking about it for days, and it came out of him all at once. "When nobody's here. Before we came. Mrs. Bocskay wouldn't say, but it's you. You ride past every day. The first day we came, you were there. You were watching her."
Zoli didn't deny it. He didn't say yes, either. He climbed down off the fence on the alley side, so that the chain link was between them, and he put his hands in the pockets of his cutoff jacket.
"Since last spring," he said. "Year ago April. My route used to go down Consaul and I was coming back late one time and she was sitting there in the rain. In the rain, in that hat. Nobody was around. The bus came and went and she just kept sitting there. So I sat with her." He shrugged, a big careless shrug, the kind that is never careless. "Then the next day I came by and she was there again. So."