So I worked from home, was there when the kids left for school and when they got home, and could be counted on most days to give Sarah a kiss goodbye before she left for the paper. It didn’t look as though that particular service would be required this day. All Sarah said as she headed out the door to the car was a simple “See ya.” Enough to let me know, officially, that she was out of the house, and that she wasn’t interested in any precommute snuggling. I watched from behind the curtain as she got out her keys, opened up the Camry, backed down the drive, and disappeared down the street.

writer’s block arrived before noon, so around eleven, on the way back from my walk along Willow Creek, I swung by the sales office for Valley Forest Estates. Phone calls hadn’t worked. Maybe a face-to-face encounter would be more effective where honoring a new-home warranty was involved.

The office was just as you drove into the neighborhood, a couple of mobile homes stitched together with an elegant front built around it as a disguise. I had a feeling that once the development was complete, they would pack up their fancy desks and high-tech photocopying machines and architectural models of the subdivision, rip out the trailers, and build one last shoddy house on the lot where it stood.

Okay, maybe that’s unfair. We’d had some problems with the house, but surely they could be fixed. I would turn on the charm with these dickheads.

As I entered the sales office, I glanced at the wood-paneled wall, where pictures of the various sales staff and company executives hung. I was looking for the guy who sold us the house. There he was. Don Greenway. The man our street was named for. Every day we basked in his celebrity. It was like living on Tom Cruise Boulevard and meeting Tom Cruise.

I approached the reception desk.

“Hello,” said a perky blonde woman in a white blouse, her hair falling down around her shoulders. “Welcome to Valley Forest Estates.”

“Hi,” I said. “I wonder, is Mr. Greenway in?”

“Do you have an appointment?”

“No. I was just hoping I might be able to catch him. I was passing by.”

“Were you thinking of purchasing a Valley Forest home? Did you want to see some of our brochures or take a look at our model homes?” She smiled the whole time she was talking, like an Entertainment Tonight reporter.

“No, we already own a home here,” I said. And the receptionist’s smile instantly vanished.

“Oh, I see. And what did you want?”

“Well, we’ve had a couple of problems and I wanted to see about getting them fixed.”