“This street went through a bad time for about twenty years—in the sixties and the seventies,” Uncle Paulie said. “But now all these youngsters—I guess you could call them yuppies—they're seeing how beautiful it could be and they're buying the old houses and fixing them up. Look at that one.” He pointed across the street to a large lucky house that had gotten a makeover. It had been painted a soft gray with dark green trim, and it had a beautifully refinished front door with gleaming brass fixtures. A stained-glass window arched over the top of the door, and a brass number was prominently displayed on the side.

“It's big,” said Carrie, the apartment dweller.

Uncle Paulie nodded. “Yeah. This was a ritzy house for an Italian family when I was a kid—a ritzy neighborhood too. Most of our people lived over on Wooster Street, and Franklin Avenue—our Little Italy. But I guess you could say my folks were upwardly mobile.”

“This was your house?”

“It was Lu's house too. And your mother's, when she was little.”

“I never imagined anything like this.” Carrie moved closer to the gray-and-green beauty.

“Pop could afford it because he was successful,” Uncle Paulie went on. “He had three grocery stores by the time he died. His family came to this country early, right after the Civil War. So even though they were poor, he still had a leg up, you see? And he was a smart businessman.”

Carrie tore her eyes away from the house and looked up and down the block. “This was your street,” she said, trying to impress it on her brain. “This was where all of you grew up.”

Uncle Paulie nodded. “Pop and Mama moved here in the twenties. It was mostly an Irish neighborhood, and farther up the street there were some old Yankee families, Griswolds, Russells, and like that. There's a Polish church two blocks over. In the fifties, when the Communists took over Poland, the priest in St. Stanislaus used to play the Polish national anthem at the end of Mass and all these little old ladies would stand there wearing their babushkas, singing, with the tears streaming down their faces.”

Carrie turned back to her ancestral home. “Your house is beautiful. I like the colors.”

“The couple who bought it—two boys, can you believe how things have changed? Dom and me, we got to know them, and we taught them to play bocce. Anyway, they wanted to know what the place used to look like in the old days. They found my name and called me. I told them Mama always had it painted gray and green every two years.” He gazed at the house, seeing another time. “It looks just like it used to,” he said. “She'd be happy about that. This place was…” He turned to Carrie and smiled. “I guess you couldn't call it her kingdom … her queendom, maybe?”

“Sounds right to me,” Carrie said.