Dana walked him as far as the park gate, because her torch was better than his phone's and because, Tomas suspected, rangers like to see their parks put back together before they leave them to the dark. At the gate she stopped and looked back once at the bench, already empty, already just a bench again. "There was a woman on the bench by the bandstand," she said, conversationally, "with a little dog in a coat, the whole time. Regular. Mrs. Albright. Eighty if she's a day. She'll have filmed the lot on that tablet of hers. She films the herons, mostly. Ducks, sunsets, the occasional proposal. I saw the screen up when I came down the path. By now her grandson will have been sent it, and her grandson, Mr. Herrera, has opinions about what the internet is for."
"I see," Tomas said.
"Do you? Because I'd go home and charge your phone, if I were you, and I'd tell whoever needs telling before the telling gets done for you. These things move faster than any of us these days. They move faster than you did, which was not, if you'll forgive a professional observation, slow." She switched off the torch, and the dark stepped politely back to being only the dark between the gate lamps. "Get some sleep, bus man. The park forgives you. The paperwork, I'll let the sergeant describe in her own words."
He drove home through a town that had not yet heard anything, past the dark depot where his bus sat in its bay with tomorrow's fault already chalked on its board in the foreman's hand, a sticking valve on the number nine that he had diagnosed on Thursday and been waiting on a part for ever since. The ordinariness of the chalk did something to him that the whole evening had not managed, and his hands on the wheel were nearly steady again by the time he turned into his own street. Nearly. He parked in his drive and sat a moment with the engine cooling and ticking, and looked at his house, which was small and square and needed its gutters seeing to, and which contained, at that moment, nobody at all, because on Fridays Sofia slept at Rosa's, as she had slept at Rosa's on Fridays since she was four, so that Tomas could take the early Saturday overtime and Rosa could have, as she put it, one night a week in which her house was a house and not a museum of a daughter.
Inside he put the kettle on, and then he stood in his kitchen in his ruined shirt with the water heating and he telephoned his mother-in-law.
Rosa answered on the second ring, with the television low behind her and a lifetime's practice at hearing, in the first syllable of a call, whether the call was an ordinary one. "Tomas? It's gone nine. Is it the bus?"
"It's not the bus, Rosa. I'm fine, before you start. I'm home, I'm in one piece, I have all my parts and most of my shirt. I need to tell you a thing that happened so you hear it from me, and then I need you to tell me about her bath, because apparently that is the order of the evening now, and I am in no position to argue with the order of the evening."
He told it plainly, as he had told it on the path, and Rosa listened the way she had listened to forty years of family catastrophe, without interrupting and without mercy for decoration, and when he got to the bench and the cars and the sergeant with the brother's programme there was a silence down the line that had texture in it.
"You didn't hit them," Rosa said at last. It was not a question, but he answered it as one.
"No."
"Not one of them. Five men."
"Not one of them. I put them down and I held them and I let them go. Kyle Rennick may have a sore wrist in the morning, and Josh Parnell is going to sit down carefully for a day or two, and the rest of it is gravel rash and pride. The sergeant has it all written down, and a ranger, and a phone, and an old lady's tablet, so if you hear it in the town with extra instruments added, that's the town's arrangement, not mine."