“I suppose,” said the woman, clearing Jell-O salad off the forehead of the baby eating like a natural disaster in front of her.

The suited man’s wife leaned in and with her hands clasped in front of her said to the other woman, “We are not German.”

“Oh. Okay.”

The man in the suit snorted. “Can we leave these rubicund convives and resume the chase?”

The man behind him overheard and nodded vigorously in agreement.

“Yep. These are good vittles.”

The man in the suit hid a wide grin behind a strategic cough and stood, gently closing his son’s book. They strolled to the front, paid, and left in a blue Nash with New York plates and peeled north on the highway.

Simon’s neck hurt from watching out the window. He thought entering the city would be sudden—a switch from woods to the narrow margins of tall buildings, like entering a tunnel at noon on a sunny day. But it wasn’t like that. The woods, at first unbroken or studded with small farms, began to fan out. Larger fields appeared gradually. The trees changed from pine to red oak and maple. These became clustered in smaller and smaller groups, around farmhouses or planted as windbreaks. The fields were vermiculate with corn and soybeans, rowed as far as he could see. Instead of everything getting larger, instead of more, the land seemed to spread; no vastness or vista, there was simply more space between the ordinariness of clapboard houses, silos, tilting barns.

The towns got larger. The more traffic, it seemed, the shallower and longer the faces of the cities, until they blended with one another and seemed endless. Simon dozed and woke when the car stopped. They were at a traffic light. The buildings were low and dirty, with a different facade on each storefront.

Fred nosed the car to the curb. Betty instructed the children to wait, and not to get out. She and Fred slammed the doors and walked down the block. Soon the car began to heat up. It was August, and the heat rolled from the asphalt in waves, crushing Simon and Lester deeper in the car. They tried to keep the backs of their legs from sticking to the black plastic seat. It seemed like forever. Waiting in a station wagon on a long stretch of Lake Avenue. Waiting in the August heat. Waiting for the next part of their lives to begin.

17

Simon arrives well before the wrecking crews, knowing they will spend two hours clearing the corner of cars and setting up orange cones that will, it is hoped, warn the traffic on Franklin and Third away from the curb.