The exit ramp overlooked the immense shopping complex. Lines of cars were worming into a parking lot so full it was shimmering, looking as if a square mile of ocean had been airlifted then stitched into the plains. The single service road running between the freeway and the mall’s perimeter was clogged, bumpers inching up to bumpers, the summer air pasty with car exhaust and impatience. Everybody in everyone else’s way. Henry’s was the only vehicle that didn’t slither into the lot with the rest. As soon as he passed the entrance, the road cleared. He floored it, making up for time lost in traffic, gunning a quarter mile down the open road until screeching with a hard right turn at the Indigo Hills Residential Park sign, an eggy pair of briefs sagging off its corner.

While the only suggestion of hills in the trailer park were the sharp buckles and craters in the pavement, it certainly felt blue, subdued. Its willow-shaded lanes stood in unnerving contrast to the outlet mall’s previous commotion. The drone of cicadas seemed to be coming from inside the trailers themselves, every last set of curtains drawn shut. A messy network of power lines crosshatched the sky, so peering upward felt like being on the wrong end of a fishing net.

Saturday afternoons in his neighborhood, life was a constant presence. Men in beaters and flip-flops watering front yards, or hunched under the hood of some fixer-upper muscle car. Gap-toothed boys and girls playing war with tree-branch rifles and latex water grenades in the street. Mothers keeping watch from front porches, stirring glasses of iced tea with lemon wedges. But here the lanes and curbsides were littered with everything but people. Whereas in his neighborhood the refuse of home improvement projects and seasonal decorations got crammed inside single-car garage stalls, here in the trailer park, debris had nowhere else to go but out to the narrow lots, which were more landfills than lawns. He rolled past a rain-faded sofa. Buckled pallets and warped lumber. Pinwheels and garden gnomes. Tipped shopping carts. Pallid flamingos. Outdated campaign signs and naked flagpoles. Car seats. A mossy engine block. Fast-food wrappers decomposing with last year’s autumn. A charred oil drum. There was something earnest about such barefaced disregard for order and outward appearances. It was so serenely desolate that it felt like a place where he could go unnoticed, unbothered, and so, for that reason, belong.