At the corner, where my school sat on the left, the truck turned right onto 51st Street. We all looked over at the police station as we drove toward the highway entrance, remembering our incident there. Uncle Tim drove by the white buildings, then the red ones in the Hole, and after that, we’d put miles between us and the Robert Taylor Homes, going up the Dan Ryan to the hundreds.

With the music on, and two rows of seats in front of me, I couldn’t hear what Meechie and Uncle Tim were saying, but they looked nice together. For a while, on these rides to Auntie Nora’s, I pretended that Uncle Tim was my bodyguard and driver, and I bet Meechie fantasized that he had a dad. Mama wouldn’t talk much about our real father; we just knew that he was absent. That he decided to leave one day and didn’t come back. It was the story of just about everyone we knew, except Precious.

Though they weren’t related by blood, it was easy to mistake Meechie and Uncle Tim as father and son. They had a matching deep brown skin color, similar mannerisms, and neither one of them were ever in a hurry to talk. They both listened to gangster rap, so Uncle Tim played a Bone Thugs-N-Harmony CD. At first, I thought he was trying to look cool for Meechie, his nephew from the ’jets—as they used to call the projects back when he was younger in the ’70s—but later on, I’d learn that Uncle Tim got into rap when he was a boy living on the South Side.

Watching Meechie up there laughing and telling a story made me relax. I thought maybe that horrible experience of going to jail was something that he had put behind him—which was naive of me. He looked so happy sitting in that passenger seat. I was in my own world in the back, hoping that Uncle Tim could teach him about manhood and how to live on our crazy block.

While Meechie and Uncle Tim caught up, I played That’s My Car, which is exactly what it sounds like, and the ride took long enough for me to collect a million cars on the Dan Ryan Expressway, past the McDonald’s on 69th, the Toys“R”Us on 87th, and the big Greyhound buses on 95th Street.

Their house on LaSalle Street was such a pretty place, painted blue and white or gray and white, depending on how the sun hit it. The houses on their block weren’t cookie-cut. One was yellow and white, another had a red trim. Even the name of the neighborhood sounded nice: Roseland. Since traffic only went one way, we played in the streets, which I wasn’t ever able to do on State Street, a wide, busy street that took people all the way downtown.