A moving truck hunkered past the driveway and deeper into the park. He hadn’t realized it was already the thirty-first. Eviction day. Now with the hammer drill paused, he could hear a distant Harley, its engine working from a grumble into thunder as it drew closer. When the motorcycle rolled past, there was Sandi, the park manager, riding on the bitch seat, where she belonged. She and Henry traded scowls before the bike disappeared to join the moving truck.

All Indigo Hills residents were familiar with this routine. Soon enough they would take to the streets to hunt down the moving truck, trailing it like a flock of vultures. They would claim a spot along the curb, watching the movers, targeting the prime scraps, hoping for a showdown between the fresh evictee and Sandi, until they were given the green light. The instant the moving truck pulled off, they pounced. They rushed and scuttled, yanking at and bickering about the leftover belongings of a person—a neighbor—who’d just been ripped out of her home. Such brazen scavenging disgusted him, mostly because he understood the instinct so damn well.

Henry grabbed the boards to bring inside, and a passing neighbor waved. An unlit ultralight 100 bobbed in her lips as she commented on the getting’s still being good. He wished her a pleasant day and let the screen door smack shut behind him.

The holes he’d bored out were tight around the pipes, making the work of leveling the planks with careful twists to the coupling pieces tedious, but after an hour the bookshelf was upright and set in place against the wall. When he told Michelle, “Hey, look,” she shushed him. Her phone was shouldered into her ear to free her hands, busy slicing a tomato. She said something about nine stacks. He asked who she was talking to, but she ignored him. Brow furrowed, she said fine, she could come pick up whoever it was on the other end of the line. Would be a good chance for them to figure out just how exactly they ought to go about all this, like.

“All what?” Henry asked.

She folded the cell phone shut. Looked at the bookshelf and said it looked good. Banquet platters sat under hand towels on the counter, and a peppercorn of a fly somersaulted above the raw porterhouses. “Thanks,” Henry said. “So what army you got coming by tonight?”

“Just Al.” She took her car keys. “I’m a go pick him up now. Bonneville at the shop, brake lights busted—again.”

He surveyed the feast. “Sure we’ll have enough?”