I cruised through the development and parked in some high weeds near the county road and watched the house until the sky was dark. Joey and the guy with the string tie didn’t show up. Shadows didn’t skulk across the landscape. The new house and its hopeful landscaping didn’t look like a place where people hid in fear or sicced leg-breakers on unsuspecting private eyes, but then they never do. When my stomach made more noise than the radio, I drove back to the Howard Johnson’s.

Each day was pretty much the same. Toby would head for school on his red Schwinn mountain bike, then Karen would leave for the bank. She would get to the bank before anyone else and unlock the door. Joyce Steuben would get there two or three minutes later, and the teller would roll up by nine, just before the bank opened. Bank customers would come and go, and sometimes during midmorning or in the early afternoon Karen would drive to a house or a building or a piece of unimproved land where she would meet two or three people and they would look and smile and point, and then Karen Shipley would go back to her office.

Every day between four and four-thirty Toby would pedal up to the bank and go in and stay until Karen left, sometimes as soon as Toby arrived, sometimes not until five. They would go home, Karen sometimes stopping to do a quick errand on the way, but most times not. Once, they drove fourteen miles to a McDonald’s, and once they drove to the next town to see the new Steven Segal film. One day Toby didn’t come to the bank. Karen left early and drove to the school where the Woodrow Wilson Smith Barking Bears took on the Round Hill Lions in a basketball game. I went in through the rear of the auditorium and watched from the stage. Toby played right forward and he was pretty good. Karen sat on the lowest bleacher and cheered hard, once screaming at an official and calling him a jerk. The Barking Bears lost 38 to 32. Karen took Toby out to a place called Monteback’s for a malt. Portrait of the successful single-parent family in action.

At six-oh-five on the morning of the fourth day it fell apart.

I was driving down the county road toward Karen Shipley’s when Karen Shipley passed me going in the opposite direction, an hour before she usually left.