His parents took walks on Sunday afternoons; decades would pass before Owen could see this custom as their way of asserting themselves as a young couple, escaping from a house that wasn’t theirs. But he, their child, was theirs, and they dragged him along, though the very prospect made his legs heavy, and he would lag behind more and more until his father would eventually double back and lift him up onto his shoulders. It felt weirdly high up there, and his father’s head seemed so strangely large and hairy that after a while he was happy to return to the earth on his own legs.

There were several routes the walk could take. One way was to turn left down the nameless alley beyond their hedge and walk across Alton Avenue and through the newer section of Willow to Shale Hill and climb it. There were Victory Gardens along the base, but at the summit paths wandered between pines and flat rocks that reminded him of sliding stacks of newspapers getting dark and wrinkled in the rain. From up here the whole town was open to view: the newest section was closest, composed of curved streets planted with buttonwoods and poplars, and then an older, rectilinear section in darker-leafed, denser Norway maples, and, beyond the Alton Pike, the oldest, southernmost part. Mifflin Avenue was conspicuous, lined on both sides with tall horse chestnuts. He saw his own house—his grandfather’s house—the bricks painted custard-yellow and the wood trim parsley-green, and Mifflin Avenue becoming in the haze a road winding through the Blake farm and heading toward Philadelphia as the river ran and glinted beside it. The view always interested his mother, but for Owen it was worth about two seconds of looking. What could you do with a view? He would rather find a dead stick and try to hit pebbles like a baseball.

Or, emerging from under the grape arbor by the side porch and walking out the brick walk, past the pansy bed, to the gap in the hedge, they could turn the other way, right, and walk up Mifflin Avenue, past the spooky Hoffman house and Buddy Rourke’s sad apartment building, past where the Bakers’ barn had burned down, past the smelly pigpens and the fenced pastures for cows, past the creek, in slow spots solid green with watercress that Grammy sometimes gathered, to a road that led up to Cedar Top, opposite Shale Hill, across the valley that held Willow.