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LaGrassa, you will come please to my house for lunch at one o’clock.” She held a clothespin, which she methodically snapped.
    “I have to go to—”
    “They told me where you have to go.” She held up a hand. Her name was Marini.
    “I have to change my oil.”
    “Change your oil. Wash your hands thoroughly. Climb onto my front porch. Knock on my door. Et cetera.”
    In truth, he was starving. He said, “I guess I’ll come, then.”
    “What is that, ‘I guess I’ll come’? What is that?”
    He was standing now, in the sunlight. He looked up. He saw what it was that had snagged D’Agostino’s eye when he had looked up. A girl in a ratty yellow sun hat had ascended, by means not readily discernible, to the top of a telephone pole, where on a small plank she sat reading.
     
    How long do you have to live in a place before you notice it? The whole morning was a dream. Around every corner was a view that should have been same old, same old, but today impressed itself on his mind as if for the first time and for all time. As in, Look, there’s a kid licking the streetcar tracks, wearing short pants—only it seemed to Rocco that he’d never seen the tracks or a child in short pants before and he was never going to forget this. As on a day when the ruler dies and everybody, without even trying, holds on to the slightest speck of mental lint from that day for years. As in, I was squirting blue sugar roses on a wedding cake when Loveypants popped the alley-oop door and whispered, “Harding went to Alaska, and now he’s dead.” And she had a tiny bit of snot dangling from her one nostril. And right away he knew it was going to be that dangling bit of snot he would remember. Today, with no apparent excuse, the neighborhood was full of these bits of snot, so to speak. A boy alone, eating a banana on the steps of the church. It must have been not going to work that did this. He had a bird’s-eye view of the forest for the trees. He went to Bastianazzo’s and got his cup refilled with the watery coffee available at that establishment. Bastianazzo himself pretended to be too busy ironing his aprons behind the counter to talk to him. He drifted about the streets awhile, noticing so much and considering the city itself, which he was about to depart for the first time in so many decades.
    He liked to go up onto his roof in the summer and look at the city. He would straddle the peak and use the chimney crown as a table for his gin glass and his ashtray. Up there you could count on a breeze in the summertime, and when you are the baker and it’s summertime you will pay dearly for a cooling breeze. The house was on the tippy top of Elephant Park, and from there he could see the thousand glittering lamps above the highway, the spires of the many churches, the mills expiring their sulfurous clouds, the rim of the lake to his right. The city was a mammoth trash heap—even the lake was brown—but it was an honorable place. It put pretty to one side. Nobody ever came here to have a good time. It was a place for people who had quit being children. It was a place to be employed for a period of a half century and thence to pass out of this life. That nobody regarded it as anything else made it unique in his limited experience and sacred.
    At home, he put on raggedy clothes. He drained and refilled the oil in the crankcase of his car, rubbed his hands with turpentine, washed them with soap, got back into his good duds, and walked to his luncheon appointment.
    The woman Marini’s house stood directly behind his store and shared his alley, but he had never been inside. She was not of his class. Her husband had been a small-scale manufacturer of women’s shoes and evidently had left her with enough to live in a certain elegance as long as she pleased. There was a rumor that she earned other income from an illicit source, but Rocco didn’t need to believe it. Wasn’t the magic of compound interest illicit enough? Her own shoes,