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away at that very moment; it had been slipping away all along.
    Though the sun was high up in the sky that day, it couldn’t do much against the wild wind. As I left my mother’s house, I turned my collar up and jammed my hat down against the cold.
    Walking back toward Gratiot Avenue, I considered again if I could pin down the day I had gone astray. It might have been a day in early fall of 1943 when I went really wrong. After the mess with the riot and Captain Mitchell and Jasper Lloyd, after Lloyd’s executive Roger Hardiman had been killed and there had been some settling of the score for his daughter Jane’s murder, I should have been resting easy. Eileen and I had been going out now and again, stepping gingerly because we had been made skittish by loss. The shadow of Alex, her only son—somewhere on his own in the world—was always there, but we were used to sharing our places with shadows. I think the knowledge or the hope that Alex was still alive gnawed at us, but again, we had been accustomed by then to a world where our expectations were kept tight.
    I had made a visit to my mother’s place in East Detroit on a day in late September of 1943 when the trees had not yet begun to drop their leaves. All the heat of summer had been stored in the earth, or it seemed that hell pushed heat up from inside the melted ground below. I always ran hot, anyway, and the prospect of visiting my mother did nothing to cool my mood. I had not given up the old Packard yet, and I drove easily north to her place, noting with melancholy how so many cheaply built shops were springing up along Gratiot, how many boxy houses were ripping up what had been green and open only a year before. If I stayed away from her for a month or more, there might have grown the husk of a service station or a hat shop on a strip of road I knew as empty. It was impossible to hold on to anything, to keep the things you knew from changing. Even though I should not have had any emotion about East Detroit—my mother had only lived there a short while—it was just the same as any other place I might have counted on. Whenever some razor-edged memory of my young days in Detroit surfaced from my brain, I was always caught by the understanding that the landmarks I had used to set those memories in place had all been changed or destroyed.
    I stopped at a couple of places to pick things up for my mother, food for her and seed for the birds she loved to feed in the yard. As I carried it all in a big box up to her porch, I could see her looking out the front window, placidly gazing from behind the gauzy curtain at the new houses across the way. Everything in the area had a sense of rawness, of rudely built newness. The houses were plainer and made largely out of cheaper materials. For my mother it must have been much worse to think about what had withered away since her childhood. She had lived too long already: beyond the deaths of four of the five children she had carried into the world, beyond the murder of her husband. She had seen me change from a rambunctious boy to a shallow youth to a sour man in his middle age, maimed and distant. Maybe there had been a time when she felt pretty.
    â€œHello, Peter,” she said. “You brought something.”
    â€œYes, I did.”
    â€œI don’t need anything.”
    â€œYou have to eat, don’t you?”
    â€œI don’t eat much.”
    Some days she was calmer and seemed more at peace. She had her finger tucked into a book on her lap.
    â€œI could cook for you, Peter, if you told me when you were coming.”
    â€œThat’s all right. I eat out.”
    â€œIt’s not the same.”
    I carried the box into the house and put the items where they belonged. There was trash to be taken away, and spoiled food in the icebox, and so I put all of it into the box I had brought. Over the throw rugs that covered the wood floor, I could see the paths my mother had worn