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thousand dollars for the place, putting down 10 percent, saving the money from his four-hundred-a-week salary working nights in industrial maintenance—first at Freezer Queen, a meatpacking company on the waterfront, and later at Wonder Bread. Both were union jobs; that was when Buffalo still had enough blue-collar work to go around. The neighborhood was warm and welcoming back then. Elmer, a reformed drag racer who served as an air force mechanic during the Vietnam War, tore the house apart room by room and restored it, adding a fourth bedroom up top. Black and white mingled well in the neighborhood; Buffalo had one of the least painful forced school integrations of any big city. Only in looking back did they notice how the conversations with their white neighbors had changed from “Isn’t this a nice place” to “Let’s get out before our house isn’t worth anything.” By the time Melissa was growing up on Stockbridge Avenue, the ice-cream and candy shop on the corner was gone, as was the big Rite Aid, victims of Buffalo’s great rust-belt decline. A pizzeria was destroyed in a fire, and the movie palace also burned down. The crime rate was rising, people were leaving, and the new black neighbors frightened some of the older whites. Elmer thought the new people were decent, but their kids were trouble. He guessed it was jobs: They didn’t have any. Both Freezer Queen and Wonder Bread had left town, around the same time that Buffalo lost Bethlehem Steel and Westinghouse and the auto plant that had employed their neighbor. Elmer found non-union work mowing lawns at an assisted-living community. In the end, it wasn’t just a question of black or white. The whole middle class seemed to be fleeing Kensington-Bailey, the same way Elmer’s parents had fled the East Side a generation earlier.
    Lynn was too busy working to pay much attention to where Melissa went or who her close friends were. With no one person to answer to, Melissa was left to police herself—or not, if she didn’t feel like it. The other kids growing up in Kensington-Bailey were the kids of laid-off union workers—most not interested in finishing school the way Lynn had, and some in gangs. As a little girl, Melissa was adorable, and smart in school with lots of friends, just like Lynn had been. Despite her pixie looks, she was formidable—quick to shout down someone twice her size for looking at her the wrong way. That reminded everyone of Lynn, too. Lynn was kind of glad her daughter was feisty, as she’d been. Her only rule for Melissa was never to hit first.
    Lynn never thought she would live in Kensington-Bailey forever. Melissa was just three when Lynn got an apartment with a boyfriend about ten miles away in South Buffalo. About a year later, Lynn came home early from work, and he was in bed with another woman. She and Melissa moved back to Elmer and Linda’s house. A few years later, Lynn met Andre Funderburg, and they had Amanda, Melissa’s little sister. Andre worked lots of different jobs, from nursing to telemarketing. Though he was black, Elmer and Linda never raised that issue with Lynn. Amanda was born when Melissa was nine. Andre got along well with Melissa, and for a time, the four of them were a family, living in the north end of town. When Andre cheated on Lynn, too, she came to live with Elmer and Linda again, this time with the baby.
    By her early teens, Melissa had boyfriends, although years of long talks about how young Lynn was when she got pregnant seemed to successfully dispel any of Melissa’s romantic notions about having a child. But as Melissa got older, the tough girl Lynn had seen so much of herself in was doing things Lynn had never done—leaving at night and staying out late with friends, then skipping school the next day. Lynn decided something needed to change. She tried sending Melissa to a Friends school for a time, and a teacher told her, “You don’t belong here.” Only when Lynn met one of her