“Yes, it probably is so, son. But we’ve…I’ve been trying to get things going again.” He looked up shyly. “Maybe when we, you and I, get to know each other better, I can tell you what it was all about.” He looked away. “Let’s walk, all right?” He looked up as if he expected a fight on this request too.

“Yes, all right.”

“Well, at any rate, it looks like your mother and I might be able to…” He did not finish. “And I was hoping that perhaps you and I could get to know each other a bit.”

Dewey found himself wanting very much to say: of course they could, that this is what he had been hoping all his life. But he stopped himself; there was too much separating them to wave away all at once. “I don’t know.”

“Maybe we could try. We have all summer. Maybe we could try.”

“Maybe we could.”

They entered the huge marbled waiting room; reflections replaced shadows beneath their feet. They went on to the parking lot, a large concrete open space with rows of dull metal parking meters ordered like the crosses of a military cemetery. There were only a few cars. From the front seat of one of them, his mother smiled and waved at them. Dymphna, who was sitting in the back, waved too. They looked very much alike.

When they reached the car, his father swung open the trunk and Dewey shoved in his luggage, then climbed in back with Dymphna. His father started the motor, stomped the gas pedal, and steered into the street.

There were a great many more Negroes than usual downtown, all, it seemed, carrying suitcases, wearing dark clothes.

“Dear? Did you hear me?” His mother had been talking to him. “I asked if you liked school?”

“Yes, Mama. It was fine.”

They were in the Northside. The streets were filled with Negroes, some sitting on white steps in front of tall, narrow, dirty brick buildings. Children played tag amid the garbage of vacant lots. Every so often, at the call of various black women with their breasts pressed flat against stone window sills, a child would break from the group and run into the house. Their good-bys seemed always quite final.

They passed a group of men standing on the corner in front of a bar with an unlighted neon sign. Their heads were bowed together as if one of them was telling a dirty joke. Dewey waited for an explosion of laughter, but none came. Instead, the men pulled apart and ambled their separate ways, solemn and alone. The entire Northside seemed strangely silent for a Saturday afternoon.

They crossed the river, and through the black steel network, seeming from the car no bigger than fly screening, the water swelled around the pillars, and the bridge, rather than water, seemed to be moving.