Tom headed south on I-5, toward the leafy, affluent suburbs of Lake Oswego, exiting at Mountain Park, a maze of nested cul-de-sacs named after Renais sance artists and scholars—Da Vinci Court, Magellan Lane, Medici Circle—a pretension on the part of some long-ago developer that, like many dumb, obvious gestures, had actually worked out. The street names had attracted those they were meant to attract, and over time the development had aged into genuine prestige. The Mexicans, watching the bloated, first-generation pocket mansions roll by, with their hard-edged lawns and SUVs parked in front, were silent.

Tom’s house was on Bernini Circle, a three-story ’70s modern extending from the hill on cement stilts. The architecture was vaguely Western, with a steeply pitched roof, angular front windows, and exposed cedar siding all around. A narrow driveway cut down to a carport beside the basement, bounded on one side by a laurel hedge and on the other by a rocky incline that became the front yard, tufted with azaleas and hardy rhododendrons. A year before, the garden had been vibrant, a series of raised beds filled with neat, bushy arrangements of wildflowers and native grasses. Since Tom’s divorce, however, the garden’s fortunes had declined. The laurel hedge had gone without shearing and the beds had grown a diverse population of weeds. In the fall, a ten-foot cedar near the bathroom window had suddenly died, losing its needles and turning brittle and white. The tree doctor had come to look at it and could find no explanation for the event other than bad vibes.

Since then the dead tree had mocked Tom, a constant reminder of all the life that had once blossomed in the household, and which now, with the children grown and the wife gone, was resolutely in the past. With spring coming on, he wanted the house back in order. He wanted the tree removed. He wanted all the light that it continued to block from his bathroom for his own.

He zipped over the lip of the driveway, guiding the Porsche to a stop in the carport, and for the next fifteen minutes walked Diego and Javier through the afternoon’s tasks—the weeding, the bark dusting, the pruning, the excavation of the dead cedar. He showed them the pile of mulch that had been delivered the week before and the new wheelbarrow he had bought especially for the occasion, and then he found them trowels and hedge clippers. Then, without ceremony, he went inside, leaving them to solve whatever problems arose on their own.