One-Two made sure the three older children followed and that Betty and Irma brought up the rear as they waded into the crowds. He didn’t push or complain with his elbows but the onlookers moved out of his way. One-Two moved like a brown boulder among them until he reached the ribbon. Betty hid her satisfaction and said nothing. She hoisted Irma higher on her shoulder. For the first time in her life people moved for her, made way for her. This is what a city should be, she thought. Just walking through, no one beating us down, no one up on the kids. She smiled at the backs of their heads because she knew they could not see beyond One-Two’s wide shoulders and rolling stride.

A man in a hard hat nodded when he saw One-Two and stepped up to the ribbon. They shook hands and One-Two jerked his head back toward Betty. The man looked again at the trucks that lined the curb and motioned them through. They followed One-Two around the open tailgate of a green city pickup and he stopped.

“We gotta stand up against this, okay? Good view here, but any closer’d be bad.” He scanned the work zone and the crane perched ready to do damage. “We’re safe here. Real safe,” he said to himself.

Simon and the others were awed into silence—the looming bulk of the doomed building, the throng of white people, the workmen bustling at the perimeter like dogs around a wounded bear. The children will remember mostly the sound and the dust, the incredible soft, lazy dust. The progress of destruction itself was slow. It took a year to reduce the emptied building to rubble and to cart that away. The stone defied the wrecking balls. The great steel weights no heavier than balled tinfoil. The progress of destruction was slow. There was no sudden transformation. No eye-blink speed of difference. So the children remember the sounds of wrecking. The bone deep crunch of stone, again and again. The cranes swept their arms back as if preparing for a ponderous stiff-armed hug. And again. The stone was pinched into dust that lazed down over the now quiet street. They were awed by it, by the steady pace of defeat. Until now the building had always been treated with care, with tenderness. Simon watched with a sense of license, that in the city there were times when you could do damage, when you were encouraged to rip something apart.

After it was clear that this would continue, that architectural death, at least, was a monotonous process, they and the others drifted away and walked toward South Minneapolis, each with his or her own thoughts, distracted and alone.

Betty’s house still doesn’t have a number, and now it seems like no place to go either.

“Lincoln, you’d better get on to bed.”