As if reading Poppy’s mind, Dawn said, “I still can’t believe they’ve left us.” She lifted her glasses to wipe a tear that had settled into the pillowy crevice under her eye. She drove past the fancy new art museum and the 1950s War Memorial, where Poppy’s prom had been held. Stately mansions perched watchfully on the bluffs over Bradford Beach. Poppy noted all the landmarks she remembered: Villa Terrace, the water tower by St. Mary’s, the hospital where she’d been born. Dawn made her way up the hill at Lake Park, and soon they were back in the East Side, near UW–Milwaukee. Home.

Dawn passed Cramer, her street, and took a left on Oakland instead, the neighborhood’s main drag, as if she knew Poppy needed a tour to get reacquainted. Some of the businesses she knew were still there: Oakland Gyros, where Michael had worked; Axel’s bar, where Poppy and her friends used to get away with buying drinks with their bad fake IDs; and Shahrazad, the Middle Eastern restaurant her parents loved. Still, much had changed. There were new businesses without character, like the Goodwill and Walgreens, and a generic Irish bar stood where the German restaurant Kalt’s used to be. She saw a sign on the edge of Riverside Park, where she used to sneak away to get high with her friends, for a place called the Urban Ecology Center.

The changes felt like betrayals. But why? Did she think her life could move on while everyone else’s would stop, frozen in place?

Would she even remember which house was theirs? The Victorians on this typical East Side block near campus all looked alike, most of them owned by professors and idealists who rejected urban flight and were committed to the social causes of the city and public schooling. The block was studded with duplexes that had been trashed by students. She remembered empty beer cans in their bushes, students urinating on their lawn, and midnight games of touch football in the street, and potlucks, book clubs, and salons. They were walking distance to the businesses on Downer Avenue, the lake, and Riverside Park. This was the kind of neighborhood where you could let your porch sag, and where her mother could paint a giant mural with flowers and birds and a peace sign on the side of their garage. Here you could adopt teenage kids, raise daughters who remained unmarried and had children out of wedlock, who took off to explore the world. Maybe they would have been better off in a more conventional suburb like Whitefish Bay or Brookfield, where there were rules, and where gossip and reputations kept everyone in line—places where they would have been expected to follow a straighter path.