“You stay outta this, One-Two. Out. I raised four of them and then this one’s white mama come dump him on me, so I gotta do it again. Again, hear? As if the first ones weren’t trouble enough.”

“I was just sayin—”

“Well it don’t concern you.”

One-Two tips the ash carefully into the ashtray and blows out the smoke. He looks at her steadily. Her face hasn’t changed much. Full lips, a stubborn jaw, and an attitude to match. Always had, even when she moved to the city with four kids and a dead husband and she was only thirty-one.

She arrived in 1960, but she did not move into the house until late spring of the next year. The house had a number, on paper anyway. The stamped metal numbers above the door had lost their black paint, corroded, and dropped off long before she carried her boxes inside during a light rain and set up window curtains. The numbers were ground right off the boards by the weather before the porch began to sag, long before Betty unboxed the kids’ clothes and ordered them to make their new beds. No one in Betty’s family was the letter-writing type, yet the mail—bills, collection notices, summons and subpoenas—always knew how to find her.

She moved into the no-numbered house the day the demolition workers put down their jackhammers and sledges, fired up the cranes and took the ball to the Metropolitan Insurance Building. His shoulders hunched under the pelting rain, One-Two ambled to Third and Franklin and saw her unpacking. He walked up the steps and knocked on the open door. Betty paused as she ripped open a box of clothes and looked up.

“Do I know you?” she asked.

“Not yet.” He hadn’t lost the GI speech swagger he had acquired in Korea.

“Something you want?”

“I just came to see if you needin help.”

He looked around and even though she hadn’t been there more than an hour or two there were knickknacks on the mantel and on the windowsills. Ladybug pincushions and cat figurines. It was all secondhand, rummage-sale stuff, but she placed them just so. She had a touch. He heard the children bouncing from room to room upstairs, yelling just to hear their own voices. It was an old house, but without furniture or pictures, without pans or cooking smells or cigarette smoke it felt big and new and the children shouted and laughed at their own echoes. They ran and jumped as if they could at least fill the house with sound.

“My name’s One-Two. You must be Betty.”

“What kinda name is that?”

“Winnebago.”

The children rumbled downstairs and ran through the kitchen into the living room and out onto the porch.