Michael slips out while Audrey is still asleep. He borrows the Walshes’ second car—a peppy little Honda that makes Audrey’s old Camry seem that much sadder—and drives to a diner. He orders a short stack and a side of bacon, and spends the meal on hold with the insurance company. When he finally gets a human on the line, the guy tells him they can get someone out to assess the damage the following Tuesday. “It’s Wednesday!” Michael bellows, loud enough to startle the sweet-looking waitress refilling his coffee.

He takes the appointment, but knows he isn’t going to wait till next week to start fixing his home. No way. He goes straight to the hardware store, buys a new set of deadbolts and doorknobs that lock, chains for the front and back. A new piece of cut glass for the door. A motion-sensor kit to install around the bay windows, front entrance and back. The twerpy store clerk seems to think he should have a professional install it, but Michael tells him to mind his own damn business. He gets a new tool set—decent, but not nearly as nice as the kit that was stolen, which had been a sixtieth birthday present from the Stallions. Cleaning supplies, industrial garbage bags, bleach, and a mop. Two bottles of ant spray. He stops at a drug store for a disposable camera—his visitors had nicked his Nikon, too—then thinks better of it and buys two.

He uses up both cameras and then starts to clean. The loose things first: he gathers empty bottles and junk-food wrappers from every room in the house, finds wadded-up napkins under the beds, in the bookshelves, behind the sideboard in the dining room. The discovery of a used needle under the couch makes his skin crawl, and he is a bit more careful about pawing around after that.

Not all of what they left behind is junk: children’s underwear, Superman and Transformers briefs, are tucked into the corner of a closet. They might’ve belonged to one of his grandsons, but Audrey runs a tighter ship than that. In the garage, the washer is full of dank, damp laundry, kid-size T-shirts and the kind of neon-bright tops his preteen granddaughter wears. He stops scrutinizing the load when he finds his hands full of wet lingerie; at that point he throws the whole of it in a trash bag. He goes through one box of bags and starts another.

The cop’s idea of it being a family down on its luck? Michael goes from thinking the cop is maybe right to spot-fucking-on when he finds a wide-ruled sheet crumpled up in the living room. He flattens it out—the paper shows the shaky hand of a little kid. My Thanks Giving by one Alex S. The kid struggled through a paragraph: We got a new hose on Thanks Giving. Moms friend Randy got us a turky. Michelle eat too much and got sick. We eat ice cream for desert.