I picked up Mrs. Boucher’s New York Times. Some mornings we listened to the radio, but it was on Friday nights at Mrs. Boucher’s that I connected to the world. She had newspapers and magazines and television. Reagan was on almost every page. We hadn’t voted for him. My mother had voted for Jimmy Carter. Reagan wanted to spend more money on nuclear arms, and he was against workers and the environment. My dad died before Reagan got the nomination, but he had told me about him because Reagan was one of the actors who had testified against others during the McCarthy trials. My father had hated him for this. He said Reagan lacked honor.

One afternoon the summer before the election, we were driving down Lancaster Avenue, and Marie noticed that the car in the lane next to us had a bumper sticker that read Wyman Was Right. It took me a minute to comprehend what this meant, that Reagan’s first wife, an actress named Jane Wyman, was right to divorce him. Whoever it was didn’t like Reagan either. At the next traffic light we pulled alongside them in the next lane, Mom beeping and all of us waving and giving thumbs-up. The other driver just stared straight ahead. We must have looked like lunatics.

Everything in the paper was depressing: how Reagan was rolling back the reforms made by the civil rights movement in the 1960s and the environmental movements of the 1970s. Workers were in trouble. Air traffic controllers were getting ready to strike; garbage haulers in New Jersey were already on strike, and mountains of trash were piling up on the streets.

“Little patriots on bikes,” Abbey had said the other night, and I thought that more and more I was becoming like Dad, that things happening to America upset me. This was us in the newspaper, this was what the United States was becoming. Everything we cared about was being destroyed, the forests and our water systems, and here we were, making decorations to celebrate this idea of us. I knew this was exactly what had separated my father from other Irish immigrants that we knew, who’d embraced it all and said America was the greatest country on earth. For them it was. They became part of it, took citizenship tests, got good jobs and mortgages. But we’d got stuck. My dad hadn’t been able to talk like that, and even though he was smart and worked harder than anyone I knew, he’d always seemed to struggle.

Soon Wilson would drive along Horseshoe because I had asked him. I wished I never had. It was like what my dad said about those who investigated people, that they were the ones who were most un-American. I wanted to call Wilson and say “No, don’t.” But I didn’t know his number, and it was unlisted. And I couldn’t ask Sage.