I hadn’t expected much from Mickey and I certainly didn’t get it. I’d worked a few months on the police beat straight out of journalism school, enough to know that being suspicious of the press is in most cops’ DNA. But I didn’t care. Sure, I’d spent a good part of my preadolescence yearning to be karate-kicking Honey West, or cool Emma Peel of The Avengers, or maybe April Dancer, The Girl from U.N.C.L.E. Mainly I just wanted to look that good in a skin-tight leather jumpsuit someday.
    My short stint covering the police log wasn’t short enough. From what I saw, dealing with the nasty side of human nature day in and day out made it hard to trust anybody, and I had enough problems in that area. So I transferred to the Features section, eventually covering health and medicine. Today, I’d do what my editor had asked me to do and then get back to pitching stories about celebrity facelifts gone wrong.
    I left Ringo, my twenty-year-old burnt-orange Volkswagen Bug, in front of The Rock Bottom to walk the short two blocks to my old street. I passed the heavy wood and brass outer doors of The Stone’s Throw. It had once been E.J.’s Grocery, where the stock had been as old as the proprietor, who was at least seventy then; you had to blow the dust off a box to see what you were buying. Since everything was twice the price of the supermarket in the next town, the mothers only sent us kids there if they were in desperate need of a vital ingredient for their tuna casserole or baked ziti.
    I was relieved to see that the candy store was still on the corner. Except now, coyly renamed The Confectionery, it had been cuted up like a '50s sweet shop—all chromed counters and red leatherette stools and booths, black-and-white checkered floor tile. Nothing like the dingy green rathole with the scarred-wood floor of my ‘60s youth. Back then, the glass cases were so clouded by cigar smoke we could barely make out the merchandise. Since the cigar-smoking counterman was E.J.’s father—ninety, if he were a day, and the guy for whom Sourballs were named—the stock was no fresher than the stuff in the grocery store. The Bazooka bubblegum was so rock hard that Billy Gilpatrick once popped a piece in his mouth and chipped a tooth.
    It seemed only right, in the interests of research, to see if new ownership had improved the quality of the confections. As I pushed through a door, it jingled so merrily E.J.’s dad would have spit out his stogie in disgust.
    The display cases gleamed to twinkling. Inside were neat rows of pure sugar in its various forms. There were the modern atrocities, like Gummi worms and Sour Patch Kids, that I was sure would never make it into the next decade, but the classics were well represented: streamers of multicolored candy dots, Smarties necklaces, Pixy Stix straws full of fruit-flavored sugar, Necco wafers, Bonamo’s Turkish taffy.... I was getting a hypoglycemic buzz just by looking.
    "Can I help you?"
    Sucrose interruptus. The teenage counterboy was wearing a checkered paper hat tipped at just the right forward angle to make it seem studied cool with his two-tiered haircut and pierced left ear.
    I tapped on the glass. "I’ll take a Milky Way." That should hold me until Mickey produced the Nestlé’s Crunch he owed me.
    The kid passed me the candy bar and I handed over 50 cents for what used to cost me a nickel. I was supposed to be grateful it now weighed a full 2.13 ounces, not a stingy 2.05, I guess.
    "Thanks." I looked around again. "Nice what they did to this place." The kid looked uncomprehending. "Um, I used to come around here all the time, before you were born." Jeez, I thought, it’s come to this. Talking like I grew up during the Depression. "You’re probably too young, but do you know what happened to the guy who used to own it?"
    "Yeah, sure." He adjusted his paper hat as if it were a thinking cap. "I heard something about it from my mom. She’s lived in town forever, like, thirty-five years." Now I was officially old. "Long time ago, maybe late seventies, he was busted for running numbers out the back."
    Ha! I knew E.J. couldn’t have made an honest buck from his crummy businesses.
    "They say he was, like, 103, but it still took two cops to get the handcuffs on him. His son came out of the grocery store and just watched him get dragged off, crying like a baby."
    So old Sourballs was the brains behind the operation. Who’d have guessed?

The chocolate sustained me as I walked along River Drive, passing DeVries Lane, one of the uphill streets in this part of town that dead-ended into the cliffs. Each was lined with perfect parallel rows of two-family houses. When I’d lived in one of them, they were all brand-new, all built by Hartt Construction—the start of the creeping suburbia that would soon infest all of New Jersey. Each first floor was red brick; the second, wood shingle. Only the colors of the window trim and the garage door set them apart and helped us kids find our way home.
    The homes here in the North End looked a little more worn now, but otherwise hadn’t changed much. My real shock had come driving up from the tunnel. The South End had been a grungy stretch of decaying freight piers, abandoned oil tanks, dying factories and noxious chemical plants. Now some of that had been razed to make way for condos and strip malls. But the recent economic slowdown had obviously delayed much of the new construction. Wood and steel frames rose out of the landfill, the skeletons of some prehistoric Cubist beasts, with stacks of concrete slabs, each about the size of the monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey. Only one construction site I passed had been active.
    I was more surprised that it had taken this long for someone to try to spin the sludge into gold. True to its name, Undercliff was shadowed by magnificent cliffs on the west and bounded along the east by iron-gray waters that reflected one of the most exciting and treacherous cities in the world. "Four miles long and two blocks wide," my dad used to say about my hometown, "caught between a rock and a hard place." With the bridge a half-mile north and the tunnel two miles south, and now a ferry in between, it was perfectly situated for commuting into New York City.
    But few did back then. None of my friends’ fathers worked there. The attitude was, Why bother? We have everything we need on this side. Besides, its residents paid the highest rents to look at us, not the other way around. I’d never thought of crossing the river. The mythic skyline was just part of the scenery, the postcard view from our kitchen window.
    At the foot of Clearview, my old block, I looked across River Drive. It was still there, the rustic wooden sign that marked the entrance to The Colony: Private. Residents Only.
    There the land sloped down to the riverfront, with oak, maple, sycamore and sumac trees obscuring the homes beyond. I had no idea how many houses were down there. Our mothers had warned us never to go past that sign—not even on Halloween, when usually we were free to walk the whole length of town. We came up with our own slightly sinister scenario as to why not we weren’t allowed in The Colony. We imagined mobsters hiding out, fingers itching for an excuse to pump a few slugs into kids dressed up as hobos or ballerinas.
    Jimmy O swore that a commune of midgets lived there too, that dwarves from the Barnum & Bailey Circus had built bungalows where everything, even the toilets, were half size. One summer, my sister, Caterina, loosely organized a scouting party to check out that rumor, but the rest of us all lost our nerve at the last minute. Only one of my Holy Moly classmates had lived in The Colony. She seemed to be normal height. But she’d never invited anyone home to meet her parents.

I turned up Clearview Terrace, narrower and steeper than in memory. Hard to imagine how I’d learned to ride a bike on this street. Because of the lane’s pitch, each lot had to be terraced, leveled for the house foundations, with a drop-off wall separating the properties. My family had been one of the original settlers, all arriving within a year or two of each other. Most were new to the middle class. Upstairs tenants came and went, usually young couples who moved on once their fortunes improved or the first baby was brought home from St. Mary’s Hospital a few towns away.
    As I trudged past each house, I ticked off the names, right to left: Soriano, DiBoise, Anderson, Greenblatt, Gilpatrick, a couple whose name I never knew because they didn’t have kids so who cared?, O’Shea, Jirusak, Giamonte, Rinaldi.
    I stopped in front of number 10. My old house was now painted dark red to match the upper floor’s brick, with brown trim. The yard had somehow shrunk. My cousins, raised in a more urban setting, had thought I lived in a national park. Now the swatch of grass in front looked no bigger than the green felt of a pool table. More evidence of how kids’ perspectives never match objective reality. What other tricks had my mind played on me?
    My father had built a rock wall on the left, into the side of the hill, creating an elevated area for my mother’s clothesline. This was now a platform garden, already flourishing so early in the season. My dad would have laughed at that. The only thing he could ever raise from the dirt was a blister, his shovel hitting stone with every thrust. Just plugs of grass between patches of bare, rocky earth, our lawn had looked like a bad hair transplant. But someone had taken the time over the years to layer on topsoil, to bring it up to suburban standards that my father never cared enough to meet.
    The Hartts had lived above it all, off a long, nearly perpendicular driveway that looked down on us. Maybe because my dad never worried that we might mess up his landscaping, all the neighborhood kids had congregated in our yard. This had been a constant thorn to Joel Hartt, two years younger than Cat and me. He could see us playing and laughing, while he was confined to his mother’s tight orbit.
    The kid had no friends in the neighborhood, thanks to Evelyn Hartt, who overprotected him to the point of a hostage situation. She must have had him late in life, as she looked at least ten years older than the other moms. We’d catch glimpses of her when she pulled weeds from the slope below her front walk. Always dressed in a multicolored caftan, her head wrapped in a turban, she’d shoo us away if we dared step anywhere on their property—which is why we tried every chance we got. We nicknamed her Endora, after Samantha Stephens’ mother on Bewitched. And Joel knew it.
    So Joel often stood on his own driveway, throwing down taunts as we played tag or tide-and-seek in my yard. No one much paid attention to him until the day he started hurling dirt bombs instead of insults. One, embedded with a rock, hit Patty Soriano’s three-year-old brother Frankie in the eye. As Frankie ran home wailing and bleeding, we all stood around with our mouths open, except for my sister. Cat scrabbled straight up the driveway’s embankment and started punching Joel with both fists. His mother swooped out screaming and tried to pull Cat off Joel, but my sister had gotten him in a headlock and wasn’t about to let go. She only stopped after Patty’s father, a wiry little guy who was quite speedy for a chain-smoker, sprinted from their house at the bottom of the street, threw down his cigarette and took over the job. That day we all learned quite a few new phrases that we would later be grounded for.
    After that incident, my parents wouldn’t let me go to Joel’s. That pretty much cut off his contact with the outside, at least within our two-block world.
    Until then, I’d been the only one his mother ever allowed to enter their domain. My visits there started when I was in kindergarten, after a spring shower, one of those first warm mornings that smell like clean laundry. On my way to the bus stop, I saw three-year-old Joel ripping up daffodils in the Giamontes’ yard and waved. He had slipped out of the house without his mother knowing, but I didn’t realize that. Catching up with Mickey and Jimmy O a half block along River Drive, I’d heard the screaming. Evelyn Hartt was on her knees on the Sorianos’ front lawn, her usual caftan bunched up around her neck—like the scene in The Wizard of Oz, when the Wicked Witch of the West melts beneath her clothes. Joel had followed me, running into the middle of River Drive when his mother tried to catch him. He laughed and threw daffodils as traffic skidded to a halt on the wet pavement. I dropped my Lassie lunchbox, ran up behind him, scooped him by the underarms and dropped him in his mother’s lap. It occurred to me now that she didn’t even say thank you.
    That day after school, Mrs. Hartt asked my mother if I could come up to play with Joel once in a while, when she was "indisposed." I guess my mother felt she couldn’t refuse, since my dad worked as business manager for Joel’s father at Hartt Construction.
    When Mom first delivered me to Joel’s, I felt I was entering Brothers Grimm territory. The Hartts’ house backed into the cliff, its steep front and side yards screened by gloomy evergreens and shrouded with close-packed shrubs. The balcony that ran the length of the middle floor had a million-dollar view (and that’s in 1960s currency), but I rarely saw anyone enjoying it. The year before, our family had gone there to watch the Fourth of July fireworks, set off over the river courtesy of the amusement park above us on the cliff. Then Cat had knocked over a citronella lantern, setting fire to one of Mrs. Hartt’s more colorful muumuus, and I expected that we wouldn’t be on their guest list ever again. We weren’t, but I think it had more to do with Joel’s father moving out a few months after.
    Instead, I went for those playdates, alone. The situation did have more than a hint of Hansel and Gretel, as Mrs. Hartt sweetened the pot by leaving bowls of Peanut M&Ms in every room. In those days, I could be had for the right sugar-delivery system (okay, maybe in these days too). There were other attractions, too. Joel always had every new toy before anyone else did: Etch-A-Sketch, a 102-piece Tinkertoy set, the latest Matchbox cars. And though he was whiny when he didn’t win at Candy Land, he could be cute, hugging me tightly and telling me he loved me each time I left.
    As he grew older, I was asked over less often, but I’d still felt protective of him and had tried to get the others to include him more. I’d overheard his mother’s ranting phone calls to her soon-to-be-ex-husband and felt more than a little sorry for Joel. But the dirt-bomb attack had been the last straw. Mickey had called a meeting in his basement, declared Joel to be the ultimate cootie and voted to shun him. I’d had no choice but to go along.
    So I didn’t expect to be greeted with open arms now, showing up unannounced more than two decades later on the front stoop Joel had inherited. Maybe he wasn’t even home yet. All I saw in the driveway was a rusting old Chevy Impala, butter yellow. Surely not his car. I would expect something more in the Mercedes family.
    Before I could put my finger to the bell, though, the door jerked open and I was looking into the face of a brunette angel.
    The boy was about twelve, with the greenest eyes I’ve ever seen, rimmed all around with long black lashes. It wouldn’t have been wrong to call him beautiful.
    "Evan, what did I tell you? You are not to go out the front door, do you hear me?" The woman’s voice, hard with panic, came from behind him. By the tone, I figured she had to be this boy’s grandmother. Evelyn Hartt. She had probably come with the house as a package deal. Poor kid.
    He hung his head and backed away as a hand gripped the door. It was ready to close when I planted my left foot on the sill and my right hip against the jamb, and peered around to see who was attached to the arm. The woman’s face was balled up in anger like a fist and it didn’t belong to Evelyn Hartt.
    But I recognized it immediately. "Aren’t you Doreen Josephs?"