Once they pass Monticello he glues his eyes to the windshield. Squinting against the August glare and the coils of pot smoke that fill the car, he looks for signs of change: new buildings, the absence of old warehouses, roads pushed through crumbling neighborhoods, or abandoned lots given over to weedless lakes of asphalt. He searches the margins of the road for everything he has been told by One-Two happens in a city, the glacial pace of change quickening since his departure. But he cannot be sure what has changed, or what he is noticing for the first time.

Some of the old buildings he has never seen before look coated in at least twenty-five years of dirt. When they turn off the freeway and onto Franklin the feeling of displacement becomes more acute.

“Hey, Burt, that restaurant always been there?” he asks, pointing at a Lebanese place on the right side.

“How the fuck should I know? I thought you came here to whup up on your uncle, not for a architecture lesson.” Burt speaks lazily, gesturing widely with his hands.

“Yeah, huh.”

Lincoln closes his eyes, sick to his stomach from the weed and the stop-start of the car, city motions he has lost the feel for. The car is driven by a distant relative on his way to pick up an even more remote relation at the train station in Saint Paul. Lincoln closes his eyes and tried to keep them that way past Third Avenue, so he won’t have to see the one thing he did know was new—the Amoco station where his house used to be. He can’t manage it and opens them while they are stopped at the light. Burt lights a cigarette and Lincoln rolls down the window and stares. He’d anticipated change, but not this, not the complete removal of his old home. Not the level concrete, the lack of elevation, the cheap fence and retaining wall around the back edge that separate the gas station from the apartment building on the side and the alley in back.

He thought that maybe the driveway would still be there—with the cracked cement he used for his solitary games of marbles. He imagined that maybe, just maybe, some of the turf between the old sidewalk and the street would have been preserved. The snow used to pile up there until March or April and he watched it every day after school, looking at the buried wrappers and sticks, the crust of exhaust melting into the pile, drifting down until the grass blades poked through the pile of sand and leaves.

He searches the corner for the elm that had ignored the predictions made for it by the city park service, and managed to live, but it is gone, too. Everything is gone.

He looks over to the other side of the street. At least the Windsor is still there, and with it One-Two. Lincoln can’t imagine what One-Two would be doing without Betty across the street. He is probably endlessly fixing pipes and sanding floors, clipping honeysuckle, keeping the old ship afloat, as he used to say.