Angels of Detroit by Christopher Hebert Page A

been a bitter old lady by the time she was twenty. His grandmother had spent the long Michigan winters stirring endless pots of hominy and pork shoulder, keeping warm by the stove. But eventually she must have modernized, like the factories. It made no difference to Michael Boni. The stuff in the can tasted almost exactly like what he remembered from when he was a kid. It seemed all Abuela had added was a garnish of cilantro and a squeeze of lime.
    By the time she died, she couldn’t have made pozole from scratch even if she’d wanted to. The Mercury’s tires had been flat for years, and the neighborhood had become a wasteland. The only available food hung in cellophane wrappers from gas station pegboards. The neighborhood was biding its time until the wrecking ball came.
    Only now that it was too late did Michael Boni realize he’d done nothing to help her. He’d been a horrible grandson. But then again, she’d never seemed to care much for being a grandmother. The cold had ruined her. When he was a kid, there’d been a dairy less than a block away, and she’d often sent him there for milk and butter, always with exact change. She believed ice cream caused nightmares, or at least that’s what she said. She was the kind of person no one grew overly attached to. Everyone else in the family but Michael Boni had moved away, many of them following their parents’ old jobs south. But even the ones who’d gone only as far as Dearborn never thought to come back for a visit.
    Michael Boni had barely known his grandfather, who’d bought this house when he’d started working at Dodge Main, just before the war. He’d timed it perfectly. He’d joined at the boom, and he’d left just before the bust. The year after he retired, pension in hand, theauto plant was razed. The year after that, when Michael Boni was eight, his grandfather died of a heart attack. Or as his father put it once, Grandpa retired once and for all from Grandma.
    Grandma had outlived them all. His parents, his sister. She’d outlived the neighborhood, too. The dairy was now an empty cube of cinderblock. The barbershop she’d been too cheap to send Michael Boni to had burned down to the crossbeams. What remained looked like the exoskeleton of a giant insect.
    Her house was on the corner. There was an overgrown hedge and bars on the windows. The garage was around back. Michael Boni built a new workbench below the only window, which looked out over the pair of empty lots across the street. He spent a lot of time staring out that window, waiting for glue to dry and joints to set. The empty lots made for an awkward view. What he saw when he looked outside were the naked backs of a pair of houses a block over. After a while, he began to feel indecent, as if he were accidentally seeing up a woman’s skirt.
    Mr. Childs had lived in one of those lots when Michael Boni was a kid. Mr. Childs had been a spot welder, and Michael Boni remembered him spending his Saturdays tuning up an old Triumph in the driveway, rattling the glass in his grandmother’s china cabinet. She’d had a special hatred for Mr. Childs. What little Spanish Michael Boni knew he’d learned while she stood with her arms crossed, scowling over the hedge. The motorcycle didn’t need half the work Mr. Childs put into it, but even as a boy Michael Boni could appreciate the lengths certain people went to just to piss his grandmother off.
    The only immediate neighbor now was Constance, who was seventy-something and lived alone in a Craftsman with a roof felted in mold. Constance’s son had moved her to the neighborhood the year before, wanting her to be close to her great-grandchildren. Michael Boni had never heard his grandmother mention Constance. It wasn’t until he moved in that he realized how odd that was, two old ladies living side by side with nothing else to do but meddle in each other’s business.
    Several days after the funeral, Michael Boni had come to look at his grandmother’s