Where They Used to Live

This is where they grew up. Middleton. Everyone still says it is such a nice place to raise a kid.

People come here from Chicago, California, New York, flush with cash from selling their overpriced houses. They look at the classic two- and three-bedroom homes with the mature trees out front, and they can picture a rope swing in the branches. They paint the upstairs bedrooms, and fill the houses with new carpeting and furniture and wide-screen TVs, and eventually, babies.

There is something idyllic about the town, something you can almost touch as you glide past a Little League baseball game in the park. It is a place where all those clichés seem to be true: nobody has to lock their doors at night, you can leave your keys in the car while you run into the store, you don’t worry about your kids walking alone to school.

Of course, people lock their doors at night. Nobody who lives here is stupid. But they feel like they could. They feel safe, which counts for a lot.

Even the place on Oak Street, the house everyone thought was haunted, has been renovated and flipped. (Although there is a good chance an elderly gangster will come looking for the strongbox hidden in the walls if he makes it to the end of his sentence in 2039.)

The longtime residents say, You should have seen it before, back in the old days. Old people say this in a lot of places. But in this case, they’re right. As nice as Middleton is now, it used to be better. Crime was almost nonexistent. It was like the town had its own guardian angels. Middleton was home to three corporate headquarters, and everyone had a job with decent health insurance. The football team was undefeated, people smiled more, and ice cream probably tasted better, too. You really should have seen it before.

Before.

Nobody has to say before what. Everyone knows. They don’t like to talk about it. In Middleton there is a deep, jagged scar marking the place where the past and the present were sliced apart. There’s where it all went wrong, and there is no going back.

That’s when Carrie, Danny, Alana, and Eric went out into the real world, and left Middleton to fend for itself.

But it’s still such a nice place to raise a kid.

Somehow the new couple on Saxon Drive, with their adorable child, managed to get the four-bedroom before anyone knew it was on the market. One week, the old guy who’d lived there was dead, and the next, the new family moved in.

Marianne knocks, and the husband answers the door, a look of relief on his face.

“Hi,” he says. “Marianne? I’m Kirk. Thank you so much for coming on such short notice.”