"Why the car barn," Zoli panted. "Why'd you pick that one."
"The bus is detoured," Ossie panted back. "There's no bus. The sign said. So she can't wait for the bus. So where do you wait, if there's no bus?" He grabbed a breath. "Before the bus was the streetcar. You told me. The car barn is where the streetcar turned around. Where Uncle Pista asked her. If she can't find the bus, maybe she goes back to where the cars were."
Zoli looked at him with something like wonder.
"That's crazy," he said. "That's totally crazy."
"Is it wrong?"
"I don't know," said Zoli, and ran faster.
The car barn was a long, low brick building with a peaked roof and tall arched doorways that had been bricked up and boarded over. Weeds grew out of the gutters. The tracks were long gone from the street, paved over in 1953, but you could still see them in a few places if you knew where to look, two faint parallel scars running in from Front Street to the old platform alongside the building, a long concrete slab raised a foot above the gravel, with an iron railing along it that had rusted orange. There was a broken bench on the platform. There were thistles, and Queen Anne's lace, and a Hostess Twinkie wrapper caught on the railing, blowing.
And there was Aunt Yolie, sitting on the broken bench in her navy dress and her little hat, with her handbag on her knees, looking down the long scar in the pavement toward Front Street, waiting for a streetcar that had not come down that track in thirty-two years.
Ossie stopped running so suddenly that Zoli ran into him from behind. They stood there at the edge of the gravel, both breathing hard, and looked at her.
"Oh," Zoli said softly. "Oh, man."