i didn’t sleep well that night, after the incident with the car keys and hiding Sarah’s car down around the corner. This might have had something to do with the fact that I slept on the couch in the family room, which is leather, which meant the covers kept slipping off, and every hour or so I would wake up, freezing from neck to toenail.

I shifted into a sitting position around 4:30 A.M., turned on a light, and thought about going for a walk. Almost every day, I’d take one through Valley Forest Estates, passing houses in various stages of completion. Many were done and landscaped, like ours; others looked nearly finished but lacked lawns and exterior details like light fixtures. Sheets of drywall lay stacked out in front of several others. There were the skeletal homes, nothing but wood frames that allowed you to see through the entire structure, and finally, at the furthest reaches of the development, there were huge holes in the ground, some with concrete basement floors poured. Beyond that, fields, and a pathway that led down to the banks of Willow Creek, home, evidently, of the soon-to-be-extinct Mississauga salamander.

It was, I decided, too dark for a walk. And besides, it was better to save it for when I most needed it: that time of the day when I’d be staring at the computer screen, unable to write another line of dialogue or describe the workings of an alien monster’s digestive system. Walks were the best way to work out plot points.

These walks, to some degree, had gotten me interested in the community, at least to the point of reading what was going on in it. There’s a tendency among us suburbanites, especially those of us who have moved from downtown but still have strong ties there, like Sarah with her job, to not give a rat’s ass about what’s going on in our own backyard. The suburbs are just the place where you live, but the city is where everything happens. So you read about what the downtown mayor is up to, even though he’s no longer your mayor, or the police chief, even though he’s no longer your police chief, because city politics and city crime are always going to be more interesting than suburban politics and suburban crime. First of all, there’s more of it. And it tends to be a lot sexier. No matter where you live, you probably know the name of the mayor of New York City. But who’s the mayor of White Plains? Who presides over the council of Darien, Connecticut? And who cares?