Mohawk

die.”
    “Wouldn’t it be kinder to leave him alone?”
    “Yes … yes. It’s just that for a long time now I’ve forced myself to be content with less than just about anyone I know. I see him rarely and almost never talk to him, really talk to him, except in my head. I’ve never once since their marriage encouraged the slightest infidelity. All I’ve asked is to see him now and then, listen to his conversation, and know that he’s near. AndI’d like someone to explain to me why I should have to give up so little.”
    “It’s like the penny on the sidewalk. It doesn’t belong to you, no matter how much you need it.”
    Anne felt less like crying now. She had needed to explain herself to someone, even badly, for a long time. Now she had bottomed out in a different realm, where tears did not apply. “Did you read that somewhere, or was it you again?”
    “Me, this time. I’m almost positive.”
    Anne took a deep breath, knowing that she was going to say it and that once said it would have to be done. “I’ll go then. I just wish I got some satisfaction out of doing the right thing. Or strength. Something.”
    “You’ve always been strong enough,” her father said. “I never know where you come by it.”
    “From you, of course.”
    Their eyes very nearly met. “No,” he said so emphatically that Anne was startled. Her father had always been a hard man to compliment: He hated lies and was embarrassed by the truth. “Your mother will be waiting,” he said before she could ask for the explanation he had no intention of giving.

24
    The boys inside Nathan Littler Junior High hear the heavy machinery straining up Hospital Hill during third period, and despair—certain that the demolition will be completed before lunch break. Some of the braver boys decide to cut fourth period, duck under the chain-link fence at the end of the alley and climb the slope to the rear of the hospital. They perch there in trees on the far side of the ambulance service road. The rest of the boys will join them during the midday recess, praying in the meantime that something will be left of the building, for they harbor a terrible longing for the long-anticipated destruction. They want to see the steel ball crash through brick and mortar. The razing had been scheduled for Friday, but when the boys hear the groan of the heavy machinery and see the men in the yellow hard hats, they know that today’s the day.
    Their fears of missing out are ill-founded, as it turns out. The men in yellow hats have to put the machinery in place and wave blueprints at one another, pointing at the building. Sawhorse barricades are gradually erected to keep spectators at a safe distance. The town’s curious, and there are many of these, have begun to congregate. The majority of those milling around were born in the doomed building, and have been back since.The boys just released for lunch, too late to find seats in the trees out back, jostle for position along the barricades in front. All along Hospital Lane people line the upstairs and downstairs porches of the two-family dwellings fronting the old, ivy-crawling institution—at first just the owners and family, then friends, then friends of friends. When the crowded porches swell past capacity, the overflow spills out onto the porch roofs. People hang out of windows. Anticipation becomes electric, and the atmosphere up and down the lane becomes nervously festive, though the ballwrecker crouches idle between two bulldozers.
    “What’s holding things up?” everyone wants to know, and several theories, all authoritatively advanced, none correct, snake among the impatient. Most anxious are the boys from the junior high whose lunch hour is slipping away. Having so recently prayed the clock forward, they now curse their folly and weigh the considerable attractions of not returning to school against the inevitable retribution that failing to do so will entail. They band together, swearing solemn oaths that they won’t go back until the hospital is rubble, arguing that so large a number of miscreants cannot possibly be effectively punished. Not if they stick together. But as the dreaded hour of one o’clock approaches, some of the boys, their hearts heavy with disappointment and a deep sense of injustice, slink back down Hospital Hill until only those who have bragged the loudest remain, prisoners of their own bravado. Even those who cut fourth period begin to drop like overripe fruit to the