Two days after the blast, on an early Saturday morning, he’d watched an ungainly Korean woman scurry out of her hatchback and pull, with scowling effort, the singed open house sign out of the ground. She broke one of her high heels in doing so, and limped angrily back to her car. Later that day, scavengers arrived, including one in a dusty Chevy Suburban with Arizona plates. People he’d never dreamt he’d see in the neighborhood showed up—sun-drunk Orange County surfers, Hawaiian shirt–wearing fatties straight out of a Far Side panel, an Indian family in rubber thongs, Latino fast-food workers still in uniform. They dived into the site like veterans of archaeological digs, emerging ash-nosed and muddy-kneed with TV remotes, shoes, stock pots, even a gold necklace. Each find would elicit a bigger whoop from the lone female who was, invariably, the designated lookout. Afterward, they leapt into their vehicles covered in dirt, the thrill of free stuff outweighing all matters of hygiene, and took off.

And as far as he could tell, the girls had no interest in anything related to their former home. Neither of them brought up the loss in seriousness or in jest; neither peeked through the curtains for ringside views. Not once did they express feeling for their mother, at least not in front of him. Whenever they drove by their old house, the girls pretended to be distracted by their cellphones. Even by his standards, that seemed repressed. When he questioned them about their wishes, the girls said they wanted to stay on with him until they were older and more independent. This frightened him—he worried about his emotional and financial resources. He spent hours on the phone with his lawyer discussing how best to proceed—legal guardianship was complicated, but possible, if he wanted to pursue it. Training to be a county-certified foster parent (with “psycho-social testing” he was sure to fail) sounded far less mouthwatering. The bulldozers would eventually come and raze all traces of plaster and blood next door; such was the history of real estate. He could just as easily be rid of the girls, his lawyer reminded him. He had absolutely no obligation to take them.