The neighborhood didn’t empty out through the day, not like the suburbs everyone left behind to work in the city. It wasn’t a place people used only for sleeping. There were young families, old retirees, and everything in between. Every morning, Mrs. Hayden, whose husband died back in the sixties in a Pennsylvania mine cave-in, would walk past our front porch on her way to the corner, where she would buy her morning paper. We thought it was sweet when Mrs. Hayden said she started buying The Metropolitan in honor of Sarah, but it was a mixed blessing, because Mrs. Hayden would invariably stop when she saw Sarah out on the porch to point out grammatical, factual, and spelling errors she’d encountered in that week’s various editions. And sometimes the crossword was all screwed up.

But Sarah was used to this sort of thing. She would explain patiently to Mrs. Hayden that newspapers must gather, interpret, and present thousands of facts in a very limited time, and what was amazing, to quote one of the paper’s esteemed and now deceased editors, was not how much newspapers got wrong, but how much they managed to get right. And Mrs. Hayden would listen politely and say, “But why doesn’t your political cartoonist know the difference between ‘its’ and ‘it’s’?” Sarah would then ask Mrs. Hayden if she would like a cup of tea or a glass of cold lemonade, and Mrs. Hayden would invariably say yes.

One of our neighbors was an actor who did a lot of TV series work and shared stories about Oliver Stone after getting a minor role in one of his movies, and the man who lived behind us was an artist with an attic studio illuminated by skylights. One block over was the extremely famous woman who’d won that incredibly prestigious literary prize for that book everyone raved about even though I’d never met anyone who’d gotten to the end of it. You’d see her occasionally down at Angelo’s, or carrying home some Chinese takeout. One day, Sarah saw her in the secondhand dress store. “What did the paper say she got for an advance on her last book? One point two mil? And she’s looking through five-year-old DKNY stuff?”

We only had one car when we lived on Crandall, which could sit for several days behind the house, depending on which shift Sarah was working. When she was on days, she’d walk down to the end of the street, hang a left, and catch the subway two blocks away. It dropped her off within three blocks of the paper. She’d take the car if she had to work evenings. She’s a lot less paranoid about personal safety than I, but even she recognizes the risks associated with hanging out at bus stops and on subway platforms late at night.