The Postcard by Tony Abbott

for dinner?”
    “Definitely,” I said. “It’s a date.”
    “Don’t forget to leave lights on,” she said.
    “It’s kind of early for that, isn’t it?” I said.
    “You never know.”
    “Okay. I will.” I turned, then turned back. “And thanks. For taking care of me.”
    “You’re welcome, dear. Say hello to your father.” She smiled and plunged her trowel into the dirt at the base of the lamppost.
    I had done it. Three minutes later, I was on my way to the bus stop. Dia was now in somebody’s side yard blowing up an inflatable pool for some small kids who were jumping up and down around her. They didn’t look like her brothers or sisters, so I guessed she was babysitting. I still had to talk to her about finishing the grass, but maybe now wasn’t the time. She caught my eye, made as if she was going to say something, probably remembered what a dork I had been and how I had shooed her away from my yard, then made a face and looked away.
    Yeah, sorry,
I thought.
I should have minded my own business when you were cutting our grass. Maybe Dad wouldn’t have yelled at me.
    Never mind. He was sad. He’d been drinking. He’s not going to do that anymore. Enough. “Enuf !” I said.
    I passed on to the corner, looking back once to see her following me with her eyes, her cheeks puffing out from behind the growing plastic pool. I found the right bus from the map at the stop and minutes later was on my way downtown.
    It’s not like I was going
into
the hotel! I wouldn’t actually be able to go where the pinhole pointed, since it was on the top floor, but so what? I was just going to look at the place. It would be crawling with workers. I would walk by. Notice stuff. Then I’d show Dad the clues I found on the postcard and wasn’t that strange? He’d like how it was all about Grandma. I think it would mean something to him. Then I’d tell him about the cleaning up I had done. Perfect.
    The moment I got off the bus, I was sticky again. The perspiration dripped down my eyebrows and into the corners of my eyes. It stung as if someone had sprayed Windex in my face. I also had the feeling someone was watching me, but who even knew I was here? Maybe just a kid on his own was strange.
    I walked a few blocks from the bus stop toward the Pier, until I stopped at the corner of Central Avenue and 2nd Street.
    And there it was. The Hotel DeSoto. A strange thrill went through me as I pictured young Nicky Falcon and his father on the sidewalk in front of it. Surprisingly, the hotel still looked a lot like it did on the postcard. It was surrounded by a high chain-link fence now, but it was still standing in its own proud sort of way. As if it had survived a lot of years, and even now it wouldn’t just crumble away to dust, not yet.
    I held my breath as I moved along the opposite sidewalk to where the photographer must have been standing, then matched the card against the actual building. One of the trees was much bigger than on the card. The other had been cut down. There had also been some construction since the picture was taken. The card was sixty years old, after all. The patio was gone. The short wall in front of the courtyard was gone. The red awning, gone. For some reason, that struck me. I liked imagining the sound of the breeze making the canvas squeak.
    The sidewalk in front of the hotel was chewed up, too. Wired onto the fence was a large poster with a computer sketch of the luxury mall that was going up. The DeSoto Galleria.
    Normally, I wouldn’t mind that. Normally, I would say, “Mall? Yay!” But I didn’t like this. Whatever else the postcard might mean, here was a piece of the past being taken away, and it struck me as not a good thing. I thought of the lobby in Emerson Beale’s story, the mahagony counter, the tufted cushions, the gold-painted columns. Had those things already been taken away? Had they ever been there in the first place?
    A half dozen workmen came out the front doors of the hotel,