Finally, I put the car into gear and drove slowly down the avenue to Mt. Ararat Church of Holiness, at Ninety-first and Houston—just a block south of the house where I grew up. I came at the church from Ninety-first—I didn’t want to see the wrecked tree in my mother’s front garden again.

In a neighborhood where twenty people with Bibles and an empty storefront constitute a church, I hadn’t known what to expect, but Mt. Ararat was big enough to have an actual building, with a steeple and a few stained-glass windows. The church was locked, but a sign on the door listed the hours for services (Wednesday choir practice, Thursday evening Bible study, Friday AA meetings, and on Sundays, Sunday school and church) along with Pastor Robert Andrés’s phone numbers.

The first number turned out to be his home, where I got an answering machine. The second number, to my surprise, connected me to a construction company. I asked for Andrés, somewhat uncertainly, and was told he was out on a job.

“A funeral, you mean?”

“A construction job. He works for us three days a week. If you need to reach him, I can give the foreman your phone number.”

The woman wouldn’t direct me to the jobsite, so I gave her my cell phone number. A few minutes later, Andrés called back. Construction noise at his end made conversation difficult; he had trouble understanding who I was or what I wanted, but “Billy the Kid,” “Josie Dorrado,” and “girls’ basketball” seemed to get through, and he gave me the address where he was working, over at Eighty-ninth and Buffalo.

Four town houses were going up in the middle of a long, empty block. The little boxes, rising out of the rubble of the neighborhood, had a kind of gallant optimism about them, splashes of hope against the general gray of the area.

One house seemed close to completion: someone was painting trim, a couple of guys were on the roof. I took a hard hat from my trunk—I keep one handy because of all the industrial sites I visit—and walked over to the trim painter. He didn’t look up from his work until I called out to him; when I asked for Robert Andrés, he pointed his brush at the next building over and went back to work without speaking.

No one was outside the second house, but I could hear a power saw and loud shouting from within. I picked my way around rusted pipe and wedges of concrete, the crumbling remains of whatever had stood here before, and climbed over the ledge through the open hole where the front door would be.