"So every day."
"Not every day. I got the route, I got my sisters, I got stuff. Some days Mrs. Bocskay. Some days Lenny, if I make him. Lacko comes out of the shop sometimes if he sees her. Father Gyula a couple times. There's like a, I don't know. People just kind of do it." He scowled. "And then you show up from Cleveland."
"Parma."
"From Parma," Zoli said, with a great deal of contempt for Parma, "and you sit on the bench like you own it, and then a sign shows up. What am I supposed to think?"
Ossie understood then. It came to him with the strange slowness of something that had been in front of him the whole time. You don't belong here had never been about the corner. Zoli did not care about the corner. Zoli had looked at a skinny kid from out of town sitting in Aunt Yolie's place at Aunt Yolie's hour and had seen the first part of something being taken apart. A kid on the bench, then a sign in the yard, then a station wagon packed with an old woman's dresses, then a young couple who liked the woodwork. The bench with nobody waiting on it at all.
"I'm not here to take the bench," Ossie said. "I'm here because she goes to it."
"Same difference, when you're gone."
Ossie had no answer for that. They stood on either side of the fence. In the kitchen, Teri turned off the water, and the window went dark, and the yard got darker.
"Why'd you say it," Zoli said. "I'm staying. You don't live here. You're going back in three weeks. Why'd you say you're staying?"
Ossie thought about it. He wanted to tell the truth, and the truth was hard to find, like something at the bottom of a drawer.
"Because it was four o'clock," he said. "And she was coming. And if I wasn't there, she'd sit there by herself and think nobody was coming, ever." He swallowed. "I know what that's like. A little. Sitting somewhere waiting for somebody."