Southland

A woman, presumably Alma, enters a man’s shop and catches him, presumably Frank, off guard. She asks about her son and finds that the storeowner has sent him home because he isn’t feeling well. He goes to retrieve the boy’s schoolbook, and the woman notes how similar the man’s office is from when she remembered it previously. The narrator notes that “the air was thick with unsaid words” (250). They talk about the boy, though there are unsaid things and the mood is tense: “She hadn’t been in there since he’d changed it around, and he’d forgotten she knew it before, and the office he used now held little relation, for him, to that other place, which existed only in memory” (250). She finally thanks him for caring for her and the boy, and the man says there’s no need to thank him. She leaves, and the man closes the store to be by himself for the rest of the day.

Victor returns to Angeles Mesa after living in Watts. He moved away a few months after Frank left for internment. Back in his old neighborhood, he notes how the people he once knew have either moved away or died, and that many of the black families have also moved away.