On the final morning of Marya’s four-day visit Wilma drove her to town along the busy pike, keeping up a rapid bemused commentary on local progress. Stretches of new ranch-style houses . . . a McDonald’s and a Burger King and a Friendly’s . . . a glassware and china outlet (“They have really good bargains in CorningWare if you know how to find them”) . . . a discount clothing store (“Even better than Norban’s used to be”) . . . even, on the outskirts of the city, a small shopping mall (“Now all they need is an A & P”). Marya would not have wanted to confess that her eye took in very little of all this newness; it sought out the older houses, the old farms, a stretch of woods here and a marshy expanse there, untouched, which she recalled with a curious biting nostalgia. She had bicycled along the pike so many times as a girl; she’d taken the Greyhound bus; ridden in cars. She had memorized the landscape without knowing. But now everything was so jumbled, so comically rearranged, how could she locate herself in it . . . ? The enormous Maccabee property had been sold and subdivided: acres of farmland given over now to “ranch” and “colonial” houses with treeless lawns and smart black asphalt driveways. The cider mill owned by the Jelinskis had been demolished long ago, when Marya was still an undergraduate at Port Oriskany; its site above the Shaheen Creek was overgrown in scrub willow and oak. And there was the Dubnovs’ tavern, to which Emmett had once taken her, spruced up now with aluminum siding and a paved parking lot, and a new name (The Pike Inn & Bar-B-Que). And the old foursquare Methodist church, a battered veteran from another time . . .

Marya felt herself a time traveler, being driven along Innisfail’s almost unrecognizable Main Street. The downtown, Wilma kept saying with satisfaction, was getting a facelift: junky old buildings razed and smart new buildings erected in their place—there was even a pedestrian mall, on lower Ash Street—and most of the streets were one-way. Marya’s eye darted almost frantically about. Why did Ash Street look so strange? had the cobblestones been taken up and replaced with nice smooth featureless paving? Where were the old Grant’s, the old Woolworth’s, the Royalton Theatre . . . ? She noted the Royalton Café, finally, in a block that had been partly modernized: its broad glassy front tricked out in “Gothic” gilt letters. But the movie house was gone.

She saw a sign, Schroeder Bros., attached to a construction site fence.

She found herself wondering how one would catch the Riverside bus, with Genesee Street now one-way.