beside her, two hundred yards away, next to a liquor store with a painted mural of the Virgin of Guadalupe on its side.
Araceli walked toward the store and the Virgin, and soon she and the boys were entering a neighborhood with houses and apartment buildings that were occupied, clapboard structures, mostly, some with iron fences enclosing rosebushes. They saw a woman flinging a carpet against the stairs of a porch that led to a two-story building with four doors. Brandon noted the strange numbers above each entrance—3754¼, 3754½, 3764¾—and was reminded of the fanciful numbered railroad platform from a famous children’s book; he wondered if these doors too might be a portal to a secret world. They passed a two-story clapboard bungalow with the rusted steel bars of a prison, and both boys wondered if some bad guy was being held inside, but a few doors down, they saw an identical structure, with no bars and freshly painted coral-colored walls, an organ pipe cactus rising ten feet high in the garden, alongside a small terra-cotta fountain with running water and a cherub on top. “That’s a nice house,” Keenan said. “Muy bonito,” he added, and Araceli thought, yes, they must be on the right track, because the houses were suddenly getting prettier. But half a block farther along they encountered a square-shaped rooming house whose doors and windows had been boarded up, the plywood rectangles forming the eyes and mouth of a blindfolded and muzzled creature. “I really don’t think my grandfather lives around here,” Brandon said again, and this time Araceli didn’t bother answering him.
Two blocks later they arrived at a street sign announcing Thirty-ninth Street and the final confirmation of Araceli’s folly: on this block, where the photograph and the street name on the back had led her, there was a collection of powder-blue duplex bungalows, apartments in a two-story clapboard building surrounded by snowflakes of white paint, and two windowless stucco industrial cubes. The address corresponded to one of the bungalows, which faced the street, with side doors opening to a narrow courtyard. Araceli reached into Maureen’s backpack, retrieved the old photograph, and matched the bungalow behind the young abuelo Torres to the structure before her: the windows were covered with steel bars now and the old screen door had given way to a fortress shield of perforated steel, but it was the same building. Together, the two images, past and present, were a commentary on the cruelty of time and its passage, and of Araceli’s chronological illiteracy, her ignorance of the forces of local history. After a day of walking and bus and train rides she had arrived at her destination, and it was clear that el abuelo Torres did not live here, and could not live here, because everything about the place screamed poverty and Latin America, from the wheeled office chair someone had left in the middle of the courtyard amid a pool of cigarette butts, to the strains of reggae-ton music pulsating from inside one of the bungalows.
“La fregué,” Araceli muttered to herself, which caused both boys to look up at her in confusion.
“Is this it?” Brandon said. “Is this the address?”
“Sí. Y aquí no vive tu abuelo.”
“No, he doesn’t,” Brandon said. “His house is in a big apartment complex, with a big lawn in front. It’s yellow. And there aren’t any ugly buildings like those over there.”
“Now what?” asked Keenan.
Behind the security door of the bungalow directly before them, Araceli could hear a second, inner door opening. “¿Se le ofrece algo?” a female voice asked through the perforated steel shield.
Araceli walked to the door and held up the photograph. “Estoy buscando a este hombre,” she said. “Vivía aquí.”
Seeing no danger in a mexicana with two young boys, the woman opened the steel door and reached out to take the picture, revealing herself to Araceli as a world-weary woman of about thirty whose smooth skin and long, swept-back eyes appeared to have been carved from soapstone. Her nails were painted pumpkin and her hair seemed oddly stiff and perky, given the circles under her eyes, but those same eyes quickly brightened as she took in the photograph.
“¡Pero esta foto tiene años y años!” the woman declared, and chuckled after recognizing the black-and-white porch and arriving at the realization that the little shotgun house with the sagging floors and peeling faux linoleum in which she lived had been standing so long, and that once it had been possible to live there without metal barriers